When Wax was twenty-three, Holloway hired him as a guide. For the next three years, Wax helped Holloway and Jed lead teams up Mt. McKinley, down into Ellison's Cave in Georgia, or across some Nepalese cwm. The pay was not much to brag about but the experience was worth plenty.
Wax sometimes gets a little out of hand. He likes to drink, get laid, and most of all boast about how much he drank and how many times he got laid. But he never brags about climbing. Booze and women are one thing but "a rocky face is always better than you and if you make it down alive you're grateful you had a good trip."[48]
"This though has to be the weirdest," Wax later tells Navidson, right before making his last foray down the hallway. "When Holloway asked me
if I wanted to explore a house I thought he was cracked. But whatever Holloway does is interesting to me, so sure I went for it, and sure enough this is the weirdest!"
On the day Holloway and his team arrive at Ash Tree Lane, Navidson and Tom are there to greet them at the door. Karen says a brief hello and leaves to pick the children up from school. Reston makes the necessary introductions and then after everyone has gathered in the living room, Navidson begins to explain what he knows about the hallway.
He shows them a map he drew based on his first visit. Tellingly, this hardly strikes Tom as news. While Navidson does his best to impress upon everyone the dangers posed by the tremendous size of that place as well as the need to record in detail every part of the exploration, Tom passes out xerox copies of his brother's diagram.
Jed finds it difficult to stop smiling while Wax finds it difficult to stop laughing. Holloway keeps throwing glances at Reston. In spite of the tape he saw, Holloway seems convinced that Navidson has more than a few loose wing nuts jangling around in his cerebral cortex. But when the four dead bolts are at last unlocked and the hallway door drawn open, the icy darkness instantly slaughters every smile and glance.
Newt Kuellster suspects the first view of that place irreparably altered something in Holloway: "His face loses color, something even close to panic suffuses his system. Suddenly he sees what fortune has plopped on his plate and how famous and rich it could make him, and he wants it. He wants all of it, immediately, no matter the cost."[49] Studying Holloway's reaction, it is almost impossible to deny how serious he gets staring down the hallway. "How far back does it go?" he finally asks.
"You're about to find out," Navidson replies, sizing up the man, a half-smile on his lips. "Just be careful of the shifts."
From the first time they shake hands on the doorstep, it is obvious to us Navidson and Holloway dislike each other. Neither one says anything critical but both men bristle in each other's presence. Holloway is probably a little unnerved by Navidson's distinguished career. Navidson, no doubt, is privately incensed that he must ask another man to explore his own house. Holloway does not make this intrusion any easier. He is cocky and following Navidson's little introduction immediately starts calling the shots.
In earlier years, Navidson would have probably paid little attention to Karen and headed down those corridors by himself—danger be damned. Yet as has already been discussed, the move to Virginia was about repairing their crumbling relationship. Karen would refrain from relying on other men to mollify her insecurities if Navidson curbed his own risk-lust and gave domesticity a real shot. After all, as Karen later intimated, their home was supposed to bring them closer together.[50] The appearance of the hallway, however, tests those informal vows. Navidson finds himself constantly itching to leave his family for that place just as Karen discovers old patterns surfacing in herself.
Later that evening, Holloway places his hand on Karen's back and makes her laugh with a line the camera never hears. Navidson immediately bumps Holloway aside with his shoulder, revealing, for one thing, his own easily underestimated strength. Navidson, however, reserves his glare for Karen. She laughs it off but the uneasy energy released recalls Leslie Buckman and Dale Corrdigan's accusations.[51]
Yet even after Navidson's interjection, Holloway still finds it difficult to keep his eyes off of Karen. Her flirting hardly helps. She is bright, extremely sexual, and just as Navidson has always enjoyed danger, she has always thrived on attention.
Karen brings the men beers and they go outside with her and light her cigarettes. It matters very little what they say, her eyes always flash, she gives them that famous smile, and sure enough soon they are all doting on her.
Navidson confides to his Hi 8," I can't tell you how much I'd like to deviate that fucker's [Holloway's] septum." And then later on mutters somewhat enigmatically: "For that I should throw her out." Still aside from these comments and the strong nudge he gave Holloway, Navidson refrains from openly displaying any other signs of jealousy or rage.
Unfortunately he also refrains from openly considering the significance of these feelings. The closest he comes appears in a Hi 8 journal entry spliced in following his encounter with Holloway. On camera, Navidson treats what he refers to as "his rotten feet." As we can clearly see, the tops are puffy and in some places as red as clay. Furthermore, all his toe nails are horribly cracked, disfigured, and yellow. "Perpetuated," Navidson informs us. "By a nasty fungus two decades worth of doctors finally ended up calling S-T-R-E-S-S." Sitting by himself on the edge of the tub, blood stained socks draped over the edge, he carefully spreads a silky ointment around what he glibly calls his "light fantastic toe." It is one of the more naked moments of Navidson, and especially considering its placement in the sequence, seems to reveal in a non-verbal way some of the anxiety Karen's flirtation with Holloway has provoked in him.
All of which becomes pretty inrelevant as Holloway soon spends most of his hours leading his team down that lightless hallway.
Frequently treatment of the first three explorations has concentrated on the physical aspects of the house. Florencia Calzatti, however, has shown in her compelling book The Fraying of the American Family (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1995)—no longer in print—how these invasions begin to strip the Navidsons of any existing cohesion. It is an interesting examination of the complex variables implicit in any intrusion. Unfortunately understanding Calzatti's work is not at all easy, as she makes her case using a peculiar idiom no reader will find readily comprehensible (e.g. She never refers to Holloway as anything but "the stranger"; Jed and Wax appear as only "the instruments"; and the house is encoded as "the patient"). No doubt inspired by Calzatti, a small group of other writers, including the poet Elfor O'Halloran, have continued to mull over the dynamics brought on by Holloway's arrival.[52]
Without focusing too closely on the fine filigree of detail presented in these pieces—a book in itself—it is worthwhile, however briefly, to track the narrative events of the three explorations and recite to some degree how they effect the Navidsons.
For Exploration #1, Holloway, Jed and Wax enter the hallway equipped with Hi 8s, down parkas, hats, Gortex gloves, powerful halogen lamps, extra batteries, and a radio to keep in contact with Navidson, Tom and Reston. Navidson ties one end of some fishing line to the hallway door and then hands the spool to Holloway.
"There's almost two miles of line here," he tells him. "Don't let go
of it."
Karen says nothing when she hears Navidson make this comment, though she does get up abruptly to go out to the backyard and smoke a cigarette. It is particularly eerie to watch Holloway and his team disappear down the long hallway, while just outside Karen paces back and forth in the light of a September day, oblivious of the space she repeatedly crosses though for whatever reason cannot penetrate.[53]
An hour later, Holloway, Jed, and Wax return. When their Hi 8 tapes are replayed in the living room, we watch along with everyone else how a series of lefts eventually leads them to the apparently endless corridor which, again to the left, offers entrance into that huge space where Navidson almost got lost. Though Holloway's ability to shoot this trip hardly compares to the expertise evident in Navidson's Exploration A, it is still thrilling to foll
ow the trio as they investigate the darkness.
As they quickly discover, the void above them is not infinite. Their flashlights, much more powerful than Navidson's, illuminate a ceiling at least two hundred feet high. A little later, at least fifteen hundred feet away, they discover an opposing wall. What no one is prepared for, however, is the even larger entrance waiting for them, opening into an even greater void.
Two things keep them from proceeding further. One—Holloway runs out of fishing line. In fact, he briefly considers setting the spool down, when two—he hears the growl Navidson had warned them about. A little rattled by the sound, Holloway decides to turn back in order to better consider their next move. As Navidson foretold, they soon see for themselves how all the walls have shifted (though not as severely as they had for Navidson). Fortunately, the changes have not severed the fishing line and the three men find their way back to the living room with relative ease.
Exploration #2 takes place the following day. This time Holloway carries with him four spools of fishing line, several flares, and some neon markers. He virtually ignores Navidson, putting Wax in charge of a 35mm camera and instructing Jed on how to collect scratchings from all the walls they pass along the way. Reston provides the dozen or so sample jars.
Though Exploration #2 ends up lasting over eight hours, Holloway, Jed, Wax only hear the growl once and the resulting shifts are negligible. The first hallway seems narrower, the ceiling a little lower, and while some of the rooms they pass look larger, for the most part everything has remained the same. It is almost as if continued use deters the growl and preserves the path they walk.
Aside from feeling generally incensed by what he perceives as Holloway's postured authority, Navidson almost goes berserk listening to the discoveries on the radio. Reston and Tom try to cheer him up and to Navidson's credit he tries to act cheerful, but when Jed announces they have crossed what he names the Anteroom and entered what Holloway starts calling the Great Hall, Navidson finds it increasingly more difficult to conjure even a smile.
Radio psychologist Fannie Lamkins believes this is a clear cut example of the classic male struggle for dominance:
It's bad enough to hear the Great Hall has a ceiling at least five hundred feet high with a span that may approach a mile, but when Holloway radios that they've found a staircase in the center which is over two hundred feet in diameter and spirals down into nothing, Navidson has to hand Reston the radio, unable to muster another word of support. He has been deprived of the right to name what he inherently understands as his own.[54]
Lamkins sees Navidson's willingness to obey Karen's injunction as a sacrifice on par with scarification, "though invisible to Karen."94
After Holloway's team returns, Jed tries to describe the staircase: "It was enormous. We dropped a few flares down it but never heard them hit bottom. I mean in that place, it being so empty and cold and still and all, you really can hear a pin drop, but the darkness just swallowed the flares right up." Wax nods, and then adds with a shake of his head: "It's so deep, man, it's like it's almost dream like."
This last comment is actually not uncommon, especially for individuals who find themselves confronting vast tenebrific spaces. Back in the mid-60s, American cavers tackled the Sotano de las Golondrinas, an incredible 1,092ft hole in Mexico's Sierra Madre Oriental. They used rope, rappel racks, and mechanical ascenders to make the descent. Later on, one of the cavers described his experience: "I was suspended in a giant dome with thousands of birds circling in small groups near the vague blackcloth of the far walls. Moving slowly down the rope, I had the feeling that I was
descending into an illusion and would soon become part of it as the distances became unrelatable and entirely unreal."[55]
When Holloway plays back the Hi 8s for everyone, Navidson's frustrations get the best of him. He leaves the room. It hardly helps that Karen stays, entirely engrossed in Holloway's presentation and the ghostly if inadequate images of a banister frozen on the monitor. Tom, actually, pulls her aside and tries to convince her to let Navidson lead the next exploration.
"Tom," she replies defensively. "Nothing's stopping Navy. If he wants to go, he can go. But then I go too. That's our deal. He knows that. You know that."
Tom seems a little shocked by her anger, until Karen directs his attention to Chad and Daisy, sitting in the kitchen, working hard at not doing their homework.
"Look at them," she whispers. "Navy's had a lifetime of wandering and danger. He can let someone else take over now. It won't kill him, but losing him would kill them. It would kill me too. I want to grow old, Tom. I want to grow old with him. Is that such an awful thing?"
Her words clearly register with Tom, who perhaps also perceives what a great toll his brother's death would have on him as well.[56]
When he sees Navidson next, Tom tells him to go find his son.
Based on what we can tell from The Navidson Record, it appears Chad soon got fed up with his class assignment and took off down the street with Hillary, determined to explore his own dark. Navidson had to look for almost an hour before he finally found him. Chad it turned out was in the park filling a jar full of fireflies. Instead of scolding him, Navidson helped out.
By ten, they had returned home with jars full of light and hands sticky with ice cream.
Exploration #3 ends up lasting almost twenty hours. Relying primarily on the team's radio transmissions interspersed with a few clips from the Hi 8s, Navidson relates how Holloway, Jed, and Wax take forty- five minutes to reach the Spiral Staircase only to spend the next seven hours walking down it. When they at last stop, a dropped flare still does not illuminate or sound a bottom. Jed notes that the diameter has also increased from two hundred feet to well over five hundred feet. It takes them over eleven hours to return.
Unlike the two previous explorations, this intrusion brings them face to face with the consequences of the immensity of that place. All three men come back cold, depleted, their muscles aching, their enthusiasm gone.
"I got some vertigo," Jed confesses. "I had to step way back from the edge and sit down. That was a first for me." Wax is more cavalier, claiming to have felt no fear, though for some reason he is more exhausted than the rest. Holloway remains the most stoic, keeping any doubts to himself, adding only that the experience is beyond the power of any Hi 8 or 35mm camera: "It's impossible to photograph what we saw."[57]
Even after seeing Navidson's accomplished shots, it is hard to disagree with Holloway. The darkness recreated in a lab or television set does not begin to tell the true story. Whether chemical clots determining black or video grey approximating absence, the images still remain two dimensional. In order to have a third dimension, depth cues are required, which in the case of the stairway means more light. The flares, however, barely illuminate the size of that bore. In fact they are easily extinguished by the very thing they are supposed to expose. Only knowledge illuminates that bottomless place, disclosing the deep ultimately absent in all the tapes and stills—those strange cartes de visites. It is unfortunate that Holloway's images cannot even be counted as approximations of that vast abrupt, where as Rilke wrote, "aber da, an diesem schwarzen Felle/ wird dein starkstes Schauen aufgeldst,"[58]
Five months or so later, Lude arranged for me to meet Kyrie at Union. I was late by an hour. I had an excuse. Every time I tried to open my door, my heart started racing for a bypass. I had to sit down and wait for the thumping to calm. This went on for almost fifty minutes, until I finally just gave up, gritted my teeth and charged out into the night.
Of course I recognized Kyrie immediately and she recognized me. She was getting ready to leave when I arrived. I apologized and begged her to stay, making up some lame excuse about police trying to save a guy in my building who'd stuck his head in a microwave. She looked wonderful and her voice was soft and offered me something Thumper had taken away when she hadn't called me back. She even wrote down on a napkin the glyph she'd created for me half a year ago to reflect my name and
nature.
Before I could order a drink, a Jack and Coke, she told me her boyfriend was out of town, working on some construction site in Poland, single handedly dislodging supertankers stuck in dry dock in Gdansk or something. It was a dirty job but someone had to do it, and what's more he wasn't going to be back for a few more weeks. Before I even took a sip of my drink, Kyrie was complaining about all the people filtering in around us and then as I finished my drink in one long gulp, she suggested we go for a drive in her new 2 door BMW Coupe.
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