The Water Witch
We moved into our little hand-built cabin in late October, an octagon twenty feet in diameter with a fifteen-foot cathedral ceiling over half the space and a low loft occupying the other half. Like Thoreau’s cabin, it had no running water and a wood-burning stove for heat. I had to hire a well-drilling outfit to look for water. We had two choices. A punched well was three feet in diameter but could only go down until it hit rock. More like an old-time classic cowboy-type well. A bored well was much more expensive. We thought we could afford the punched well. The outfit arrived with a big machine, tried three places, came up dry each time, charged us $100 and left; the three holes with gleaming red dirt mocking us like open laughing mouths. So that first winter we hauled water in a thirty-gallon trashcan in the back of a pickup from Chuck and Nancy’s house. In the mornings, we would step out the front door with a heavy pot, break the layer of ice that had formed the night before and dip up water for breakfast and washing up.
My cousin Philip had lured me to the area a few years earlier with descriptions of the beauty of the place and the peculiar topographical features of this spot at the foot of the Blue Ridge where temperature inversions made it warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer –– an isothermal belt. Hearing we were having trouble finding water, he suggested I hire a dowser, a water-witch, he called it. Philip’s wife had been born nearby and had lived most of her life in the area, so she had a deep knowledge of who was who and who could do what. They gave me the phone number of a guy who was happy to come over the very next day to help us find water. I was cynical about such a skill and suspicious of his ready response, but having come up dry three times, and not wanting to throw away more money, I decided to give it a try.
The man arrived looking less like a shaman and more like a floor worker from the Bigelow carpet mill up the road. A small man in loafers, blue jeans, and a broad-collar shirt turned up tight at the sleeves, his hair was dark with just a few lines of gray, and slicked back from his face in a way that was pragmatic rather than stylish. His name was Mr. Belew. He got out of a worn-out two-door Ford, threw the front seat forward, and reached into the back seat for two classic forked dowsing wands. He told me he had stopped “just up the road a piece” to cut them. One willow, the other from a peach tree. Fruit trees were particularly good, he said, mentioning something about the amount of water the tree needed to produce the fruit. Again, my suspicion radar began to blink.
Not inclined to small-talk, he straight-away began walking across the sunny, open meadow holding the willow branch in both hands, but in an odd way. The two forks of the stick, rather than being grasped like the handles of a wheelbarrow, were grasped the opposite way, his thumbs turned out, the sticks coming together out of the blade of the hands. His thumbs pointing backward over each shoulder, the stick pointing up into the air, he marched deliberately back and forth a few minutes with me in his wake, watching for some jive, wondering why I’d always seen, or imagined I’d seen dowsing rods held the other way. Or was that only in the cartoons?
As I trailed after him, he slowed and stopped. Expecting hornswoggle of some sort, I watched carefully, but to my surprise, he seemed to be oblivious to my presence and to be exerting a genuine effort to keep the dowsing rod pointing up into the air. The muscles of his arm tense, the stick, still flexible from its life only moments before on a tree, curving out of his hands towards its conjunction. Then the rod began to bob. Mr. Belew’s hands remained in the same attitude, gripping tightly, pointing the stick up into the air, but he couldn’t keep it that way. Slowly it descended, twisting itself downward with such insistence it split; too green to break in two, one of the two forks split just above the man’s palm, tearing the skin of the willow to reveal bright green flesh beneath. I took a breath.
“Well, there’s your water,” he said with remarkable nonchalance. “It will be running along in a kind of river underneath the ground. We can do this a few times and plot where the stream is, so you can decide where’s the most convenient place to drill.” And then throwing away the broken willow wand, he began the same process again using the peach stick. He spent ten more minutes plotting possible points to drill, and then, his work done, his demeanor broke and he became more conversational. Had I not witnessed this from a perspective of literally right beside the guy, had I not seen the actuality of his tensed muscles, his effort to keep the wand pointing up, the fact of one breaking, I might have been skeptical. Could this be? Can a piece of wood locate water hundreds of feet below the grass? I ask him how he had learned to do this and he demurred, saying lots of people could do it. He put the wand into my hands in the same fashion I had seen him use and instructed me to hold a question in my mind as I walked slowly back and forth. “I am looking for water within one hundred feet,” for example. Am I being hoodwinked, I wondered, is this guy blowing smoke up my butt? Feeling silly, I did as he instructed for several minutes but after he saw me getting no response, he went to his car and brought out two pieces of copper rod, a little slimmer than a pencil. They were bent into an L and he put the short ends into my palms and held the long ends straight out. “These are easier to do than a water wand. Hold them lightly, keep the long ends pointing forward and hold the question in your mind. When you are over water, the rods will cross.”
This time, to my amazement, as I walked over a spot along the line he had plotted, the copper rods mysteriously did move, despite my concentrating on keeping them perfectly level so gravity could play no part. Slightly intoxicated by this, I went to the crest of a rise at the place I thought would be a logical spot for a well and tried again. “I’m looking for water within one hundred feet of the surface.” Nothing. I walked a few more paces, holding the thought and again, the rods began to move, slowly swung together and cross. Was this possible? Was I deluding myself?
As if he had another appointment he needed to make, the man walked over to his car, pulled open the driver’s door and tossed the rods onto the passenger seat.
“Well, good luck,” he said.
Pointing to the peach stick, I said, “Uh, can I have this?”
“Yeah, but it’s no good after it dries out.”
As he held the stick toward me, I realized I needed to hand something to him as well and had neglected to establish the fee before this all started. Taking the stick from his hand, knowing how little money was in our bank account, I asked how much he charged for this service.
He waved his hand as if he were brushing at an insect in his face. “This is something given to me. I didn’t have to earn it or pay for it, it was a gift from the Lord, I reckon. Wouldn’t be right for me to charge people for it, I just do it to help folks out.” He got into his car, waved, and drove away, leaving me standing in the meadow filled with shame. A week later, the well drilling rig hit water at ninety-five feet. Five gallons a minute. Forty years later, we still use the same well.
Five years after the water-witch came, living in the most urban place in the country, I would ask myself to translate this primal agrarian experience into terms that were meaningful to people who expressed more interest in semiotics than in seeds, whose lives were ruled more by media than by the rising and setting of the sun. Those were the gatekeepers, the people who, in 1985, would determine whether my artwork was to be seen or not, and ultimately, whether I would have a voice to speak to anyone about the transforming experience of the dowsing rod.
Craig Pleasants is an artist and activist who has worked on the front lines of artist empowerment for four decades. His artwork has been exhibited widely in venues across the U.S. and Europe: the Alternative Museum, White Columns and Artists’ Space in New York City, the Musee d’Art Contemporain in Marseilles, the Kunst und Gewerbeverein in Regensberg, Washington Project for the Arts, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Jersey City Museum. Two of his artist’s books, The Three Little Pigs: as it was originally passed into English Folklore in 1620, and Footnotes: for an argument in favor of marginal housing, are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the former is one of the longest continuously running artworks on the internet.
He is the former Artistic Director for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, one of the world’s most venerable and respected artists communities. In 2014, he founded Sculptorhouse LLC, http://www.sculptorhouse.com, to merge architecture with his sculpture practice in an effort to address two crises in housing: affordability and climate resilience. Most recently he has been writing essays and cultural criticism, using meditations on his art practice as a portal into those conversations.