A Water Witch

My birthday is the 11th of September, now Patriot Day, a day that belongs to history books and TV news shorthand, and to a whole lot of people, worldwide, other than just me. “9/11,” grocery store clerks, insurance operatives, and DMV attendants repeat sadly, and sometimes suspiciously as if I’ve brought something evil into their room, bearing those numbers. My students are Y’s, or Milennials, and in the language of generation coding, 9/11 belongs to them—along with Columbine and social networking. The events of my birthday outmoded me, all of us X’ers, aged us as surely as MTV did the Boomers.

Yet for me, my birthday has always been synonymous with finding myself in a new place and time and the world around me made over completely. That’s what happens with a birthday smack at the start of the school year (and then, “the academic calendar”). Each year my birthday has had to seek me out, track me—sometimes only to the next classroom down the hall. (In those years, it was both perilous and exciting to decide if bringing cupcakes was going to be cool.) Other times, I’ve been newly living in a new city on my birthday, and three times this decade in a new state. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was waking up alone in my first apartment, having recently relocated across the country to a southwestern desert corner where even the weeds were unrecognizable.

Maybe everyone has that feeling on a birthday: that of holding closely an enormous and personal secret, something at once childish, as commonplace as a navel, and yet also irregular, as we know from the mad-hatter’s inversion, the wickedness of a party for an unbirthday.

This year in Illiana, my birthday had to find me in a washer and dryer repair shop on the edge of Amish country. It was not a significant birthday—not a 21 or a 30 or a 40—and having given it a big slip this year, another cross-country move, it did not seem right to ask too much of the day, that it deliver or perform like a younger model, or a special commemorative edition. Yet on this birthday in 2009, I, bearer of the mark of the beast, would be discovered a water witch.

Ken H

He’s dowsed all over the county—and even out of state, in Arizona. Doodlebugging, it’s called, when searching not for water but oil. Anything might be sought through dowsing: pipes, missing persons. Incidentally, Arizona’s also where this year’s national water witching convention will be held, which seems like it’s the joke—dowsing for water in the desert. Or it’s the ultimate challenge, as serious as serious gets, like scuba diving in the Bermuda Triangle.

My first go at dowsing, and my first success, was in dowsing for Ken himself.

First to find Ken H’s town, wind your way through the Illiana corn maze in a southeasterly direction; then, to find his shop, just look for his truck. You know, Ken’s truck. Inside the shop itself—larger on the inside than it looks from without—confront the second maze, inner coil of your journey: this, the graveyard of used major appliances, Kenmore, Maytag, and Frigidaire, with representatives from every recent (and not so recent) decade, in every state of repair. Amidst the rowed machines lie spare dryer ducts and agitators, ice cube-maker bins and heating coils. Every once in a while, humming beneath this jumble, one of the machines, dryer or a deep freezer, turns out to be on—extension cord snaking through unseen holes back to a power source.

And on the wall by the cash register—amongst other tackings and postings, a sign about old fishermen, a tongue twister concerning the shop’s loose hours of operation (here when we’re here, not open when when we’re not)—hung a photocopied newsletter article concerning a Kentucky water witch, a man with a long white beard. Not, incidentally, Ken.

I’ve been intrigued by water witching ever since T. told me he had a grandfather who was one; somehow it makes him sexier, like his eighth, or maybe it’s sixteenth, of Cherokee blood. My parents have a collection of troll dolls from Norway, and one with a warty grin and knobby hands holds a crooked Y-shaped stick toward the ground, leering and suggestive.

“Pretty wild stuff, huh?” Ken H., white-haired (no beard) but twinkly-eyed himself, returned his pencil to its perch behind his ear. On a previous visit (I’m a terrible buyer, a hemmer and hawer), we’d talked Maytag washer transmissions (new ones are shoddy, Ken averred) and I’d countered with a question about energy use. Keep an old machine out of a landfill, keep a new one from being built, Ken had shrugged, and I suspected him of spying right through to my liberal heart and its weakness for the eco-chick. Or, of noting my Oregon plates.

Yet Midwesterners and environmentalists do share a common ground when it comes to reusing, and making do—or, at least some of the older ones still do, like Ken.

And this time, I dowsed him: “You can do it too. You can witch water.”

He blinked back in surprise, and then again, sneakily, proudly.

“What’s the date,” he was saying a few moments later, looking up as he filled in the receipt. Then, the water witch shivered again, two brisk tsk tsks under his breath: “What a horrible day.”

I finished my check with a flourish. “It’s my birthday, actually.”

Range, depth, belief

Like I said, I didn’t have big expectations for the day; I spent my birthday morning buying a used washer and dryer, the first I’d ever own, no quarters required, and what day more appropriate for a thing like that, which, surely, must age you?

After he and T. wrangled the machines into our basement, a house the water witch thought he might have been in one time before, Ken H strode abruptly back to his truck, and then returned. He’d brought rods, two L-shaped dowsing sticks, each with a small copper tube on the end where he gripped so as to show clearly any abrupt swivel was of the rod, and not of him.

He said, lip twitching with a secretive smile, we’d just see if I could do it.

“I can tell depth, too,” he’d told me in the shop, which was more than the man in the news article could do. Back in the day, as dowsers have done for centuries, he’d used a fruit tree branch, Y shaped. He showed me how he’d hold it, palms and wrists up, arms and stick out in front straight and loose. When that sticks drops, he said, you feel bark burning in your hands, twisting abruptly and taking you with. You couldn’t stop it if you wanted.

How does he tell the depth?

“The stick points down, and then it bobs.” He gestured with his hand, palm down, like patting a small child on the head, slowly. “Count one, two, three bobs. Four.”

“What are the bobs? Feet?”

“Feet. Then—then, can you reckon what it’ll do when it’s hit the bottom of the water? It will shake side to side then, like saying ‘no.’” He swept with his palm.

In Arizona, that water he’d dowsed was down 400 feet. Oh yeah, there’s water there in Arizona. Just pretty far down for anybody wanting to get at it.

“Here you go,” he said, after showing me once, taking a quick turn around our lawn, a rod in each hand, his strides long and sure, like pacing out the boundaries for a backyard volleyball court or horseshoe pit.

The Skeptics Dictionary notes that there is no scientific explanation or evidence for dowsing—for water, oil, minerals, or otherwise, and therefore suggests the practice be considered divination. I like that it is, in this way, considered at all. I’d expected a sharper rebuke. One explanation for the phenomenon is that the rods merely reflect the subtle movements of the witcher’s hands, the witcher in expectation of water skillfully reading—whether consciously or not—other clues of the landscape. Of course the scientific studies that have concluded as much have dumbfounded water witchers, and people who have watched water witchers, who will detail the myriad times water has been found—or oil, or what have you: the proof in the pudding.

Was it hereditary? I’d asked Ken H.

It’s more about belief, he’d said, after thinking for a moment. You had to believe in it.

I held my arms out yoga-straight. My first few tries, striding about my lawn on my birthday, no underpants on (and I hoped no one knew; you should have seen my pile of laundry!), I was pretty sure it was the wind that caught and swung the rods, sending them spinning and crossing into an X. Then the right one moved so sharply inward I thought it might whip a 360 fully and catch me in the face. I turned and walked back.

It works best when crossing over a vein, Ken H. explained. If you’re walking along in the vein, the rods may just be confused.

We walked along the front of the house, and found something again. The gas meter? We were next to it. The rods crossed like ski tips.

“This is also where our basement leaks,” I said, laughing. The thing about witching is that you don’t really know you’re right unless you’re willing to dig up your yard.

On the side of the house, my sticks crossed as I crossed the two eaves trough lines, and uncrossed in the dead space between the downspouts. Ken H. and T walked around behind the garage, looking for the likely water pipe line from the house.

I handed Ken his sticks. Quickly, he found what must surely be the main water line, catching it on both sides of the garage, following it back to the house. We all ended up at garden hose, where the rods crossed for me, too.

Of course, Wikipedia also suggests that in most geographic locations, water can be found nearly anywhere, at some depth. In our wet Illiana valley, the spring rains this year flooded fields until June, affecting dramatically the corn crop, which was not knee-high by the fourth of July, but barely planted in the sopping ground. On the news we’d been hearing about it, and in the grocery stores, and post office, and bank lines, though when I ask around, I haven’t found people yet who are corn growers themselves, or who know the corn growers; and yet we are surrounded by the corn and when it rains we think and we talk about its effect on the corn.

Here, we are employed by the Marathon factory or the Hershey factory or Wal-Mart; otherwise we work in gas stations, car washes, tanning salons, government offices, funeral homes, real-estate offices, the hospital, the state prison, or the schools. There is an ethanol plant, though it’s unclear how many it employs. There are not many cars.

“How was your birthday?” T would ask, later.

I did laundry; I’m wearing clean clothes, and eating M&Ms, sugary from corn syrup. I don’t like to turn on the TV on my birthday, so we went to a movie: a blockbuster thousands of people across the country, and around the world, watched with me today. It will gross 100 million, though in our small theater we were six, and one older woman fell asleep, snoring.

During the movie, even I forget what day it is. Birthday. National Day of Remembrance.

Well, it found me, I tell him. Even here.

August Arrival

Day 2, a Monday, (August 10)

The cicadas here are as big and round and wrinkled as your thumb, their squat bodies as seemingly unfit for flight as bomber planes. Our morning began with an inspection of a dead one on our sidewalk, its wings like paperclips that had been once unfolded and then, for not quite the same effect and never again the same use, folded back. At night, those suckers can sing. And they’ve got something on the evening sounds to which we’d grown accustomed in Portland (rattling shopping carts, stoop-conversations, very early morning delivery trucks). You can tell there are millions of cicadas out there in the corn. That’s why their size, once you get one up close, is so completely alarming.

Today, our second day here, was our first for goods and services. Yesterday, a Sunday, we couldn’t find a place open for a beer, striking out four for four as we traveled by bike to the local taverns. It wasn’t just the bars; on Sundays the super Wal-Mart and Marathon station go it alone in conducting their businesses, the infidels. Except, this August Sunday, the pool was also open. We’d first spied this gem from Portland, on Google maps: the outdoor rec center pool, not three blocks from the house we’d be renting, a mysterious sapphire rectangle wedged within a bigger greenish rectangle, near a couple of baseball diamond shapes. In person, there was also a long curving slide, diving boards both high and low, mini-golf, and concessions.

It was a hot day, the kind when steamy air catches in the throat already at nine a.m., and with nothing open we padded our way to the pool in our flip-flops, paying $3 to the high school-aged girl in the booth in the shade who took one look at us and—as we were conspicuous, I guess, in our age and our childlessness—correctly pronounced, “You haven’t been here before, have you.” She explained about the hourly safety checks, one of which would be happening shortly, right as we were walking in. At a blast of a horn everyone cleared the pool, heading toward lawn chairs and towels, tugging at swimsuits and pressing damp footprints onto hot concrete. We began scanning for white plastic chaises of our own, T already naming the dives he would complete once re-entry was permitted. In the meantime, we watched the teenaged lifeguards climb down from their towers, stretch both lazily and self-consciously in their summer tans and sunglasses, and then make their own dives into the pool, surfacing with languid breaststroke kicks to shake their hair gently. Safety check: a wake-up for the guards. For the swimmers, a hint toward toilet use, sunscreen re-application, and concession purchases.

But that was Sunday, the day when nothing was open. Today we had business, and set out on a short walk to the town square, around which traffic circles counter-clockwise only and at the center of which sits the courthouse, still the tallest and most impressive building in town. (It’s Protestant country, here in Illiana. And, though the two competing banks are multi-storied they are still too new-looking for full grandeur of presence.) Other businesses on the ring include a nail parlor, a Goodwill, the Post Office, a bar, the Cable company, and a few other bank/investment type places, and a handful of antique shops. With the shops—faded facades and mismatched awnings, window cases dusty—it’s a little as if a few of the craftiest proprietors simply out-waited their neighbors, took on the whole shebang of the square’s aging, unsold inventory, and changed their signs. Voila! Antiques! The museum of What Was Before Wal-Mart (B.W.M).

It wasn’t quite as hot as the day before—or, we were pretending it wasn’t as our plans for the day did not include the pool and instead we were toting our wallets and ID’s, insurance forms and contact numbers. We crossed the railroad tracks—the long straight seam that divides the town, north and south, and which stretches like the equator itself from both ends toward the diminishing horizon. Then, coming upon the square from the west, we found it: a two-story affair on the back side of the courthouse ring, white bricked and with narrow stairs and high windows. We rounded the corner, assessing casually another emptied, once beautiful building…except, there was a light on inside this one, and a man in a white apron sweeping. A well-designed but homemade sign spelled out opening, each letter occupying its own white square, strung across the window like a necklace.

I convinced T to come with me to inspect. So far, it didn’t seem like we’d be the ones to err on the too-friendly or too-nosy side here. In our quest to find beer, a young person I’d singled out by his long hair and black tee as a likely drinker not only offered a run-down of all the package stores in the next county over and their respective driving distances, but also his cell number in case we got lost. A neighbor had offered to help carry our moving boxes, and a co-worker had presented a phone book (laughably thin) that she’d personalized with labeled sticky tabs for services a newbie might require. At the new corner shop, our new best-friend-to-be didn’t disappoint either. He met us at the door, and invited us in to look around. He had muffins, was opening a bakery. Oh, and he’d recently lived in Portland; he’d just returned to his hometown so he could start his own business.


I’ve moved to new towns before—new towns that are very different from the ones I’d left—so I’ve been preparing myself to rationalize all the feelings correctly, with proper perspective. But hearing the name of your old town unexpectedly on a new person’s lips is like hearing your name spoken once again by a dead lover, raised from the grave—or so I imagine. Out that bakery window flew all the rules T and I had agreed to (we would not talk endlessly about our old town to people in our new town; we would not let on that our new town, with its super store, seemingly no recycling, and smoke-belching, night-glowing, high-fence-having oil refinery built half on top of an old cemetery terrified us just a little).

Also chief among my worries has been the age-old one of any newbie: we wouldn’t make any friends. In our new town, like in the small Midwestern towns both T and I grew up in—there might be a real glut of people in our age group—not to mention people in our age group coupled but not married, with school loans instead of home loans. All good small-town mythologies have it quite clearly that to be successful is to leave—though this doesn’t lessen the moral failure in doing so. (Returning eventually rights the wrong, if you’ve been properly humbled by the failure of your big-city dreams.)

With the baker we talked shopping, whole grains and chain stores and Amish products and grass fed beef. By the time we left, he was pulling out a post-it-note and writing down the name of his friend who teaches yoga classes in town. “There’s no sign or advertising,” he joked. “But if you come to the 6 o’clock class, there’s a few people who know the poses.”

I told him about the yoga class I’d attended in another small Midwestern town. Someone had cross-stitched wall hangings of the various animals and elements after which the poses are called—mountain, pigeon, fish. East meets West. The marriage of the Vedic Tradition and Joanne’s Fabrics.

“Now there’s three of us who don’t belong,” our new friend the baker said, maybe mischievously, maybe ruefully. Later, I’d mention his name and the new bakery to a neighbor who would say, sighing, “Oh, him.”

I was reminded of a co-worker who’d said softly while shaking my hand, “Don’t let the culture here scare you.” Then there was the bookstore owner I’d spoken with on the square. She’d looked carefully around her (completely empty) shop before whispering to me, “There are places to go other than Wal-Mart.”

“There are some good people here,” the baker said finally, and I began to wonder if these were the words, roughly, of a secret code. “You’ll see. There’s a few of us here.”

And maybe there are—and maybe in droves, just like those cicadas that haven’t stopped yet, out there in the corn.