Ninety-four minutes about my husband’s life. I’m on screen for four seconds. The woman “who kept him alive” gets a chapter title.
For twelve years I ran base camp. Permits, weather windows, the money, the children, the phone call at 3 a.m. when a rope failed.
Rhys Calder climbed the mountain; I made sure there was a mountain to come home from.
Juno Reyes-Park produced the documentary, climbed the last two expeditions beside him, and cut the film so that the story of his life is the story of the two of them on a ridge.
At the premiere a man in the third row asked Rhys who the woman in the four seconds was. Rhys laughed and said, “That’s Hollis. She holds the fort.”
I held it for twelve years. I let go of it that night.
I’ve gone home to Larkspur Falls with the children and with something Juno’s edit forgot to check: the raw footage. Nine hundred hours of it. Shot, logged and owned by me.
Rhys can have his film. He can have his climbing partner, on the mountain. But the version of his life that leaves me out is not the version that’s going to survive, and he’s the one who’s going to have to say so — on a stage, on the record, with the sound up.
