It was a sunny, mild day in Tucson, Arizona, Jan. 19, 2018, when Mark Haley climbed into the beloved 1926 Ford Roadster that he’d “built from nothing,” revved it up and started down the track in a two-car drag race time trial. Ten seconds in, going over 100 mph, the right tire came apart and he slammed into a wall, bounced off, twisting the fuel pump hose before he slammed back into concrete, gas pouring over the engine.
With the help of doctors, family and video someone took of the crash at the Tucson Dragway, the Utah man pieced together what happened six months later when he woke up in a burn treatment center in Phoenix. He’d been in and out of consciousness because of sedation and didn’t really remember much of the intervening months. That day, Haley, then 49, would learn that his left hand had been amputated at the wrist. The fingers on his right hand were gone, as well. And he’d been burned over half of his body, including singes that reshaped his nose and made his right eyelid droop. He was probably on fire less than a minute, but the damage was incredible.
He wouldn’t be able to talk for months, because he was intubated.
But the hands. The hands were the worst. He was an avid car guy who grew up working on and even building cars with his dad since his childhood in Las Vegas. He was a woodworker and cabinetmaker by trade, a welder and fabricator. He was, simply put, a hands-on kind of guy.
Sometimes, he’d complain that his hands were cold so a caregiver would put woolen gloves over his stump and palm. “Looking back on it, I think I just didn’t want to look at them,” he said.
And his situation was complicated, not just medically. He was in a strange state — in more ways than one, but geography was a big deal as he was hundreds of miles from home. He and his wife Joycelyn had been planning to divorce before the crash. Their marriage was already over, but the strength of their bonds endured: She held tight and made medical decisions, plus helped care for him and their children for many months even after he finally transitioned back home.
“I give her so much credit,” he said. “I know some of my friends were resentful when we finally called it quits. I don’t fault her at all. We were headed that way anyway. I will sing her praises the rest of my days for what she did for me when this happened.”
Long road back
The Haleys had five children — two his and one hers in a blended family when they married, as well as a pair they had together. He considers them all his kids. One of the children died in July 2021. They’d been married for 20 years when they divorced.
He still lives in the home they shared in West Bountiful, Utah, where goats roam in the back yard and several cats have the run of the house. The driveway and garage have vehicles in various states of repair — including a 1950 DeSoto coupe he and his son Liam and some close friends are rebuilding from its life as a shell and the Firebird they’re working on that belongs to Liam; the teen wants to drive his date to prom in it. Mark Haley is blessed with people willing to do the parts of the rebuilds for which he still has passion and expertise, but not dexterity. He is largely the conductor, rather than the star violinist.
Liam is a senior in high school and lives with his dad. The goats are guests of sorts. When Haley opens his door, he says adamantly they belong to Joycelyn. That was their agreement when they first got them when they were married and she still comes over and cares for them daily.
His recovery from the crash was brutal and took a very long time. In some ways, it’s a never-ending journey. But he never again felt as low as that moment in Phoenix when the sedation was finally gone and he first understood clearly how damaged his body was.
Finally back in Utah, six months after the crash, he went first to a special long-term acute care recovery unit in Bountiful that was at the time on the second floor of the South Davis Community Hospital. He was there for two months. Back then, he couldn’t lift his arms off the bed and had to be picked up to be moved. “I was a 200-pound infant,” he said.
They had to build him up so he had the strength to go into regular rehabilitation at Intermountain Medical Center in Salt Lake City, where he spent another two months, this time on the 12th floor, where city lights could be marveled at in the night sky. “It’s not a place where you want to be, but if you have to, it’s a good place to heal,” Haley said.
Things were still so complicated. For instance, his right pinky toe got an infection that refused to heal and had to be removed. So he was limited in the weight he could put on his foot, and couldn’t walk for part of that time, which didn’t make recuperation easier. The weight restrictions came off about a week and a half before his insurance ran out and he went home to finish healing. He worked feverishly near the end of inpatient care to master skills so he could manage life at home. But he was grateful Joycelyn and other family would be there.
Going home with a walker was a possibility. But he’d been telling everyone who would listen that when the time finally came, he was walking out unaided.
It was less of a walk and more of a shamble, he said. But he did it.
So in November 2018, not quite a year shy of when he joyfully left the house for what was to be a good time at the track in Arizona, he came home.
Still just Mark
Mark Haley and his friends still often go to car shows and his sense of humor shines in unexpected ways. One of his best pals, Clint Spradling, laughs and laughs about the day they were at a car show and a woman nearby was complaining about the temperature. It was so hot. So hot, she kept moaning.
Finally, Haley spoke up. “I’ve been hotter,” he said mildly, causing her to turn to and look at the visible remnants of the day he spent roughly 45 seconds in a car that was on fire.
Then he smiled broadly.
Spradling is delighted to relate the story, which he says tells a lot about the man who’s been his friend for more than 15 years. They are closer since the crash, he said. It was Spradling and their friend, Tom Sleight, who drove to Tucson a couple of days after the crash to retrieve Haley’s devastatingly mangled vehicle and other items.
By the time they got there, the online community was already posting the usual nasty comments and jokes about the crash, as if the man who’d burned and lost so much wasn’t real, but a bit of entertainment. Spradling bristles just talking about it. He said he was seeing dramatic videos and thinking, “That’s my friend in there” as he watched the car ablaze.
But as much as he loved Mark Haley, he said he wasn’t ready to visit him in the hospital in Phoenix. He didn’t know if his friend would live. “I said, ‘I’ll see him when he gets out.’” And he fervently hoped that would happen.
True to his word, the day after Haley arrived back in Utah, Spradling showed up. He’s been nearby ever since.
He said that today he’s amazed by his buddy’s capability, his zest for life, how fun he is. Haley, he said, is just the same as he always was. When he hangs out with him, he doesn’t think about the crash, though he knows that has changed some things. But not Mark’s basic nature.
“If there’s a problem, he’s going to overcome it and conquer it, and he is just incredible in that aspect,” Spradling said.
Confronting different
Despite the good nature that friends like Spradling comment on repeatedly, Haley admits that some things irritate him. While he appreciates others’ offers of help, he doesn’t like it when he’s using the self check-out stand at the grocery store and a “helpful” clerk nearly pushes him out of the way to ring up his groceries. Offer to help and he may say yes or no. Take over and “that’s when I lose my stuff,” he said. He wonders how they think he survives when they’re not there to push him out of his own way.
“Would you like some help?” is a better approach.
He doesn’t like people telling him that he’s an inspiration or that he’s doing so good, either, when he’s doing things that are now simple and also look simple to outsiders when he does them. One day, he took his wallet out of his pocket and put his debit card in the slot, then punched in his pin number. A woman gushed that he did that so well and he told her “If you want to be impressed, you should watch me change the front brakes on my truck.”
He does that, too.
His accomplishments don’t surprise Joycelyn, who said he‘s mostly always done whatever needs to be done. “He doesn’t let very much slow him down.”
She said Haley was always good at solving problems. In every job he had, “he was never the boss, but he quickly became the person that everybody went to: ‘Oh, I’m trying to do this thing, and I’m not sure how to do it.’ And he would say, ‘‘OK, well, let’s figure that out. Let’s get this done.’ We had various things around the house that needed to get done. And he’s like, ‘Well, I don’t really know much about plumbing, but I’m going to figure this out and get it done.’”
When he’s out among strangers, Haley gets strange looks sometimes, but those don’t bother him much. Though he did take the time once to address a stranger in a store. The man was pushing a very young girl in a shopping cart and she was looking at Haley’s face and hands with interest because they were different. He was smiling at her and showing her how his hook opened and closed, how he could pick up things. It was an easy, relaxed interaction.
Then her dad turned around and made what was clearly a “fake jokey scream, but it was still a scream. I told him, do not teach her to be afraid of different. Although I know it was jokey, because I understand the context, she might not. If she thinks you’re afraid of something different, she will be afraid of something different.”
His own grandson, 18 months old, sometimes shoves his arm into the socket of the hook hand if Haley’s not wearing it. His grandpa has shown him how the hook opens and closes and can pick things up. “He’s going to grow up comfortable with different,” Haley said.
Helping others find their way
The dream for Haley, once he was feeling more like himself, was to continue to pursue that old love — fixing and racing old cars. Before the crash in Tucson, he’d been racing for a few years at Rocky Mountain Raceway. He loved the sport.
By this time, he was using a hook prosthetic on his left arm and managing to do many ordinary things like dressing and feeding himself and brushing his teeth by adapting his methods. It’s a combination of ingenuity and practice. When he brushes his teeth, for instance, he puts the toothbrush into a holder attached to his other arm, squirts a bit of toothpaste in his mouth and just goes for it.
But a couple of months ago, he gave up the dream of racing. It’s too expensive to load the vehicle and drive wherever to compete, though he and some friends go to car shows every chance they get.
He works — and vehicles are an essential part of that. He is a delivery driver for an auto parts store, which is itself kind of a nice fit given his near lifelong love of the many pieces that together form a working vehicle.
But that’s not really what he sees as his next run. That has two parts, one realized and one aspirational.
He’s a peer mentor at two different hospitals. He helps people who’ve been injured or become disabled in some way see that life is good, you can keep your sense of humor and perspective and still lead a robust, joyful life. So he visits with people in rehab where he was in rehab and talks to and encourages them. Telling his story and hearing theirs and not just cheering them on, but helping them figure out next steps and how to move forward.
He’d been back in Utah for a while, going to Phoenix to be treated for his burns, when it occurred to him that he’d never set foot in the University of Utah burn center, so he showed up one day for one of its group meetings. “And that snowballed into now I am a peer mentor with the burn center and so I occasionally meet with burn patients there,” he said.
He learned to be a peer mentor from a woman who didn’t know she was teaching him the skill. She was someone his wife knew pretty well. As a teenager, an accident at a girl’s camp left her with quadriplegia and she’d become his quiet role model long before Haley was injured. He’d seen that she graduated from college, became a mental health therapist and was living independently and well.
So lying in that first acute care bed when he got back to Utah, he thought about that. “She has been doing this for years. I can do this. I can figure this out,” he told himself. And somehow, he did.
Figuring things out is one of his superpowers, Joycelyn Haley said.
The road ahead
He still wasn’t completely sure some days that he would actually figure things out. Could he continue his love of cars and racing and mechanics? Could he be independent?
One lesson he learned and shares with those he mentors is that you need to be careful with comparisons. He sees people get mad because they can’t do things they once could, comparing themselves today to before whatever happened to them. “That’s an unfair comparison,” he explains. “Compare yourself to the day you got to the hospital. Where are you now? Compared to that, whenever that was, you’re so much better now.”
His aspirational dream is becoming a motivational speaker. He joined a national speakers association, but can’t figure out where to actually begin to try, though he’s very articulate and has solid self-confidence. He’s given himself a mental deadline. Money’s tight and he wants to talk to a group, publicly, before dues are due again, just to see how it feels.
The man who raced is starting another run. His friends are betting he’ll win.
