Witch Way Down: The Supernatural Search for Ground Water
By Tim Teichgraeber (Originally written for Vineyard and
Winery Management in 2014)
An hour with the ebullient Rob Thompson, one of Napa
Valley’s premiere water dowsers, can be dizzying, especially for a hard-headed
empirical realist like yours truly. Within a few minutes, he tells me that his
mother is a psychic, that he and his mother communicate over long distances
without speaking, and that he is dyslexic, bi-polar and a genius. The
conversation jags wildly between the fundamentals of water witching,
yet-unearthed pirate treasure troves and Thompson’s discovery of vast beds of
fresh water underlying the Pacific seafloor -- enough water to alleviate the
current drought and more. “I just don’t know how they’re going to be able to
get it out,” said Thompson. He says that the CIA has taken an interest in this
find.
Water dowsers are widely used by farmers of all stripes,
including Napa Valley vineyard managers, who seldom drill wells without
consulting a so-called water witch. The skepticism of hydrologists and
geologists, who view the practice of dowsing as simple superstition, has yet to
deter landowners from paying esteemed dowsers like Thompson up to $400 per hour
for gushing wells that can increase property values dramatically.
Renowned dowsers like Elwood Mee (of Mee Lane fame) and
Laurie Wood, both now deceased, have passed the torch to dowsers like Rob
Thompson and Marc Mondavi in Napa Valley, who still speak of energies,
intuition and sensitivity as the most effective ways to find underground water.
Other dowsers claim the ability to find precious metals, lost pets, and,
presumably, car keys.
Dowsing is a form of “divination,” finding something through
some combination of human intuition and supernatural inspiration. It is at its
core, a mystical practice with no established scientific basis, but employment
of so called “water witches” to zero in on the best spots to drill wells is
still standard practice on farms throughout America.
I met with Rob Thompson and grower Doug Hill in Yountville
to talk about how it is done. Many dowsers use stainless steel rods or willow
wood sticks. Thompson also claims to be able to find water remotely, using a
map. Hill pulls out a large 3x4 foot map detailing a property in the Napa
hills. Thompson retrieves one of a handful of copper and amethyst pendulums
from a modest plastic tackle box. With his left hand he slowly scans a
straight-edge ruler across the map. From his right hand dangles a copper pendulum,
which shifts from a linear to a circular pattern when he senses water under the
location of the straight-edge.
“You’re asking it something?” I ask.
“Yeah,” said Thompson. “Where’s the water?”
After a few passes, he points to a wooded ridge where he
says the water is plentiful.
“This is just a tool,” said Thompson, holding the pendulum.
“I don’t need this. I can use my fingers.” He said his fingers will go numb
when they’re pointed toward a water source. Thompson says that different dowsers
work better with different tools, whether they be stainless steel dowsing rods
that cross when the dowser is above water, or pendulums of different materials.
He also says that those tools help to manifest the sensations for those that
aren’t experiencing them. They offer outsiders a visual demonstration of what
the dowser is experiencing.
“I’m just emptying my mind,” explained Thompson. “Get a
stopwatch and see if you can empty your mind for a minute. I bet you can’t. I
can do it for two hours.”
Doug Hill reminisced about the eccentric Elwood Mee, who
worked occasionally for his father. “He always had this checkerboard hat – he
was just a character. I went out with him five times, and he hit every time.”
They take me outside to try my hand at dowsing. We’re about
500 yards from the Napa River, so I’m pretty sure there’s water just about
everywhere, plus it’s been raining. Buckets. We’re definitely talking gallons a
minute. But the rain has briefly let up. I get a quick lesson, and pretty soon
the stainless steel rods are crossing. Then it starts pouring. I may be a
better conjurer than a diviner, notes Thompson.
Château Montelena’s Bo Barrett claims to have a dash of the
gift himself –enough to find broken irrigation pipes in a pinch, but when it
comes to drilling a well on one of his properties, he brings in the
professionals. And I’m not talking about hydrologists.
Barrett says he never drills a well without consulting a
dowser. Rob Thompson has found a few wells for him, not at Montelena itself,
but other properties that Barrett has an interest in. “Richard Slade, the
hydro-geologist, thinks it’s all voodoo and he’s got a good track record (of
finding water), too. I don’t know why dowsing works, but it’s pretty
widespread. You can go back to Laurie Wood or Elwood Mee, Frank, Marc Mondavi.
The way I understand it, all of the oil in the world is still being dowsed,”
said Barrett.
“When I was a kid and the dowser
used a willow stick, I could feel the pull on it, but I never trained myself up
on it,” said Barrett. “I can fly a helicopter, but they can dowse, you know
what I mean. They could probably fly a helicopter too, for about two minutes
before they’d crash, while I can fly it for an hour. In other words, it’s one
of those skill sets that you can build up.”
“When we were originally
developing Montelena, my dad was an attorney from L.A., and he didn’t know much
about dowsing. The vineyard manager said, you need to get a water witch – a
dowser.” My dad was like, ‘What’s that? They find water with a stick.’ Oh sure,
yeah, right. My dad said, ‘Get three of them and send them out there blind. If
two of them hit on the same spot, we’ll drill there. And that’s what we did.
That well is still producing for us here,” said Barrett.
“Rob (Thompson) has done a couple
of miracle wells up on the side of a hill where I was lucky to get 13 or 16
gallons per minute. He hit a gusher that pumped at 220 (gallons per minute) for
a day, and which we developed for 100 gallons per minute,” said Barrett. “There
was another property where he said, ‘There’s no water here,’ and I said ‘If you
can find something I’ll buy your kids a pig at the county fair.’ He says, ‘In
that case, I’ll find you at least something,’ and hit a minor well for 6
gallons a minute, and I was able to develop that to at least get started.”
“Richard Slade and the science
guys are good too, because they can make an educated guess as to what layer
will have water,” said Barrett. “Do the witches always hit? No. Some are better
than others. Slade is a really good hydro-geologist and he hits a lot. Rob
Thompson is a really good dowser and he hits a lot. If you go up to Spring
Mountain, you can dig a hole with a shovel and water shoots out.”
Scientists have often compared the
subtle unconscious muscle movements that make dowsing rods cross to the
subliminal responses that slide a pointer, or ‘planchette’, across a Ouija
board. Dowser Marc Mondavi agrees that they are very similar.
“There’s no science behind it.
Some people can run a Ouija board and some people can’t,” said Mondavi. “Over
50% of the people that I’ve been around have some of this energy. They might
not have enough energy to be a dowser, but the rods will work for them.
Scientists all think its hokey-pokey, but the proof is in the puddin’.”
“Laurie Wood was my mentor. After
I came back from college, we needed to find a well on one of our bigger
properties. I knew I could do it, that I had the energy, but I didn’t know what
I was doing, so I called Laurie up and he agreed to show me how to do it. He’d
do most of his dowsing on Saturdays and Sundays and would call me up and say
what are you doing today or tomorrow and I’d tag along with him. He would show
me the ins and outs, and a few tricks he’d learned over the years. Now I’ve learned
a few tricks of my own,” said Mondavi.
Mondavi also says that the art of
dowsing requires a clear mind and ‘asking’ simple questions. “It’s asking
simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions. Is there 20 (gallons per minute)? Is there 30?
In a given area, I know what to expect. In Yountville you can expect 800 to
1200 or even 1400 gallons a minute. If you head up to the western hills, there
are areas where 10 gal/min would be a good well. Up there I’ll start asking ‘Is
there two? Is there three? When the rods quit crossing,that means ‘No,” said
Mondavi.
Mondavi estimates that probably
upwards of 70 or 80% of the farming community nationwide uses water dowsers to
drill for ground water.
“Some people think it’s bogus
because there’s no science behind it. I just know that I’m very successful at
it. So was Laurie Wood. Every once in a blue moon, we come up with a dry hole,
but it’s not very often, and it’s always in an extremely difficult water area,”
said Mondavi.
Mondavi says that a lot of the
work he’s doing these days involves replacing shallow wells that have run dry
as the water table has declined.
Under the current drought
conditions, water use in California is more tightly regulated than ever, but
ground water is still fair game if you can find it. By some recent accounts,
drilling services are back-logged for many months. Re-purposed and reserved
water is often sufficient for irrigation, but wineries require better quality
water for winery uses. As Barrett puts it, “Wineries run on money and water.”
Dowsers find water, and that generates money.
I asked Sam Earman, an Assistant
Professor of Geology at Millersville University what he thought of water
dowsing. He told me that, “In some areas of the world, as long as you drill to
a fairly reasonable depth, you're almost certain to hit water, so a dowser
could 'hit' on almost any spot and have success. That's obviously not as
likely an explanation in more arid areas (e.g., Nevada), but it would work pretty
well in the northeastern U.S.,” said Earman.
“A dowser that has a better-than-chance success
rate is almost certainly either consciously, or unconsciously picking up on
clues that can be seen at the surface. Localized depressions in land
surface, fractures in the earth, and differing vegetation are all examples of
clues a geologist might use if they were trying to site a well based only on
looking at the surface,” said Earman. “A dowser might recognize these
sorts of clues and either deliberately move the dowsing rod or have an
inadvertent twitch (same concept as a 'tell' in poker) that will move the
dowsing rod.”
It is also worth noting that dowsing has found
an audience desirous of easy finding tool in armed forces engaged in military
conflicts who would like to find people behind cinderblock walls or disguised
roadside explosives. A British company called ATSC sold a device to the
military that it claimed could detect the presence of various types of
explosives, drugs, ivory and other substances. The device was sold to 20
countries in the Middle East and Far East for as much as $60,000 per unit. The
government of Iraq is believed to have spent $85 million on the devices. In
January of 2010 the managing director of ATSC was arrested, subsequently
convicted of three counts of fraud and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-22266051
That story alone,
however, will probably not dissuade many farmers from employing dowsers, as
they have for centuries, if not millennia.
Five years ago, I was
at my parent’s house for Thanksgiving with some of the extended family, and
many were lamenting the fact that some legislators in their home state of
Kansas were insisting on teaching creationism next to evolution. Most of us
were aligned in our reverence for science. It was my aunt Ruth, a former Christian
missionary in Africa, who weighed in with a remarkably profound thought: “There
is more than one way of knowing something,” she said.
As an undergraduate
psychology major with a minor in bullshit detection, I read hundreds of
terrible ‘scientific’ studies. There are many things that science doesn’t
understand, from why I trust one potential law client after a brief meeting and
don’t trust another, to how I know that a pinot noir will express itself better
in a certain shaped glass. Those are decisions that I base on experience and
intuition. I might not have agreed with her ultimate conclusion, but in that
precise moment, my aunt Ruth was right. There is more than one way of knowing
something.
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