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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