I wrote a few months ago about Lars Holbek, who was our first interview subject and longtime friend of my family, and his trials with a cancer that had shown up in October/November. On Friday morning, we got word from Lars’ doctor, Mac Johnson:

In the last 10 days, there has been a steady progression in Lars’ cancer despite his strong will to fight it…On Tuesday, he and Nancy met with his oncologist, and the decision was made to transition to hospice care. He is at peace with the decision. He is at home, the days are mostly warm and sunny, and Nancy and Suren are his constant companions. He doesn’t complain of much pain and the meds are keeping him comfortable. There’s still an occasional twinkle in his eye, a quick grin.

As my father hugged me, I shrugged it off. I was angry at the messenger. I was about to drive to work and I didn’t have room in my head for something so unpleasant. It had all happened so quickly. I had been convinced that Lars would recover easily, months ago, in the way that all little girls look ever upwards at their heroes, thinking them impenetrable to anything the world might throw at them.

Later, faced with the pressing need to send a letter to him by the Sunday-night deadline, I would sit by my car, parked on an unknown Los Angeles side-street at night to write my letter, and cry.

As fate would have it, my email wouldn’t quite make it to Lars in time. I would find out a few days later that, unbeknownst to us all, he passed away Friday night…perhaps right at the moment my father and I sat together drinking red wine and reminiscing about him. My father had ended his own letter, “I will write again soon. Love, Mark.” He was planning to send along more pictures and stories. I read that Lars’ friend Michael Schlax was caught driving against snow from Portland, OR hoping to make it to Lars in Durango, CO in time, but couldn’t quite make it either.

Of course, what happens/what one says in the Eleventh hour isn’t really as important as it seems in the moment. What matters are the hours upon hours that happened for years upon years leading up to the end of a good life, and Lars sure led one hell of a life.

I looked at my interview tapes labeled “Lars Holbek” on the shelf, and they suddenly became so terribly valuable. Lars’ last email to my father had ended, “Hope to see you in the spring. love, Lars.”

Since I couldn’t share my letter with him, short as it was, I thought I would share it here instead.

“Dear Lars,

My father was saying to me how people like you and himself who have lived full lives of friendship, love, adventure, don’t mind so much when it has to end. As he said at some point, you both probably should have died a long time ago between all the bad choices and follies of youth! Still, it sure is sad for the rest of us to say goodbye when that time comes. I still hope good things last forever, even if it is [statistically] impossible. But I am glad that you are now free of pain and surrounded by a place you love and people who love you.

Only now do I realize how extremely lucky it was that a few months back you happened to be in Twenty Nine Palms when I needed an interview, and you let me come and do one with you in the midst of a warm windy desert night. Little did I know it would be my last chance to capture your stories, your face, and your voice for the future.

Of course, I didn’t really need a video camera to do this – your warmth, humor, kindness, and being have long been imprinted permanently on me. I have grown up listening to you and my father tell stories about your adventures together with so much love for each other. I know how much joy you’ve brought to his life, how lucky he was to come across another person he could align with/relate to so much. You’ve brought happiness to my mother and me as well, and I’m sure to everybody else who’s been lucky enough to know you.

I’m sad that you won’t able to see my documentary, because I’d hoped that it would make you so proud and delighted. So please just imagine the most wonderful story you can think of about you, my father, and all the other people you met along the way, and we’ll go with that.

I will never in my life forget everything magical about you. I hope your atoms mix with the universe so that every time I come to a wild river, you’ll be circling in the eddies watching over kayakers, or any time I see a Volkswagen broken down on the side of the road, I’ll listen for your laughter going by, knowing you are blending with the world, making sure the universe stays balanced.

Nos vemos algun dia en un sitio bonito.

Love,

Mark’s daughter

Oakley”

To read up on old entries about Lars, try:
http://rockadventuremovie.com/filmdiary/?p=50
And go from there.

If you want to read more about Lars life, there’s a nice obituary article about him here: http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20090317/OBITS/903171092

As before, there is a Yahoo group you can write to if you are a friend of Lars or Nancy. Just go to Yahoo groups and search for Lars Holbek, you will find pages of love from all the different people he touched in his lifetime.

You can still watch this for now, with hope of more to come from his tapes down the road as the project moves along:

Beep. Slap. Cellphones just don’t have the same kind of dramatic hanging-up qualities like those old school phones from the 80s, I thought. But that’s for another day, and right now I was happy, celebratory, running around the house in my pajamas. I’d just gotten off the phone with Dana, a volunteer coordinator from the American Alpine Club who is trying to help me setup interviews with rock climbers in Colorado.

The greatest thing about this project so far (though we’re in the early stages, so, no gloating) is the great responses I’ve been getting from people in the climbing community. It’s genuinely inspiring.

When you hang out in LA and mention you want to make a film, expect your waiter to chime in ‘you, me, and everybody else in this over-priced hamburger joint, babe’. I wouldn’t really begrudge the comment because its true! (LA is crawling with filmmakers who want desperately to make crappy movies for lots of money.) But when you are making a film that means something to a whole community, well, it becomes more than just a personal fancy, but a group effort. And that feels pretty cool.

Alex, the crew member responsible for the hand drawings on the website, suggested that I put up bios of the climbers who will be interviewed in the doc. So here is a start:

Let me introduce you to our first official sign-on for the project: Lars Holbek.

Lars and a stray dog, circa 1973.

Lars has climbed, camped, kayaked and hiked across the continent, through North, Central, and South America.

He has lots of First Ascents from the [then] unpopulated Red Rocks of Nevada, including a sweet committing and traditional line known as Ginger Cracks.

(thanks to fivenineclimber.com for this pic)

Shortly after the trip in the Red Rocks where Lars completed this First Ascent with Mark Moore, the two were riding a freight train when, as luck would have it, they were spotted by a railway official. The official, however, only caught Mark, forcing him to get off with his two dogs, and leaving Lars behind. After they were split up, it would be months before the two friends would see each other again and find out what happened. (The details form one of my favorite stories, so I’m savin ‘em for the movie.)

Lars is also an epic figure in the whitewater kayaking and rafting scene, having done over 30-50 first descents in the USA. Remember the Tony the Tiger commercial with the Tony paddling down a river? Yup, that was Lars.

He currently has a converted vegetable oil bus, and is building a green sustainable home/barn/paradise on some land in Colorado. The last time I saw him a few years ago, he was sleeping in a mattress propped up in a tree on that land.

The man has stories to make you laugh, gasp, and get goose bumps.

A crackling on the other end of the line. “Well, I’m honored you want to talk to old geisers like me,” says the man whose rugged face graced billboards across the world, in his cheesy but wonderful off-handed sense of humor.

This is Lars. Our first real subject.