Witching the Well

Until the day the Water Witcher came to our farm, the only thing I knew about dousing was what I’d read in a Foxfire book; that some people had a gift to find water and they used a stick to do it. Water witching is from the old days when magic was a potent word describing what was not understood. I’ve never found a good explanation for what I saw that day all those years ago and, believe me, I’ve looked. It’s magic just as real now as it was then. Some good Christians bristle at the concept of magic but the ones around here don’t, although you’d never hear them speak on it, much less use the word. I was taught blessings to say while cleaning a gun to make it shoot true and I know old women who can make a bad cut stop bleeding just by whispering words over it in Jesus’ name. Exodus 22:18 says “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” but I wonder if it’s okay to drink their water.

My dad had hired a well drilling contractor and some surveyor with the Water Council to find a new well, but every place they drilled was dry. He was frustrated and worried about how much money he’d spent so when our neighbor, Mrs. Hazel, stopped by that evening with a homemade blackberry pie, she was a welcomed sight. See, Mrs. Hazel knew things; she had been born 70 years earlier on a homestead that once stood on the eastern fields of our land and she’s never lived more than a 10 minute drive from it. While us kids ate pie, Mrs. Hazel told Dad and Mama about how 60 years back a man witched all the wells in the area, including ours. She said the man had a son still living who could also witch and that he’d find the right place that the surveyors had missed.

Bright and early the next morning, Mama had us kids lined up and we waited with Dad and Mrs. Hazel to meet this stranger. I was shaking grass off of my sandals when I caught sight of an old blue Ford truck cutting through the dissipating fog in the valley. He drove up to the ridgeline and parked, the sound of creaking hinges carried far and it was anyone’s guess if it came from the cab door or the old man himself. He stood crooked and hunched and shuffled into the edge of our woods where he bent over near the base of a willow. When he straightened up, he had a stick in his hands. He stood there in the shade and fiddled with it, looking it over, testing it like some sort of archaic quality control. When he was finally satisfied, he came to meet us. 

The stranger was ancient, so old that time felt thinner around him somehow. His countenance was rigid and he smelled like Bowling Green and chewing tobacco. The morning light made the lines on his face look like a map of the all the rivers of the world. Dad and the witcher shook hands and it was then that I got a look at the willow dousing rod he’d made. It was shaped like a Y and had been stripped of bark on both shoots that made the V. After the adults had finished speaking, the old man turned away towards his task, put a pinch of dip in his mouth, and held the dousing rod in both hands stretched out before him. My sisters and I followed him and, surprisingly, Mama didn’t yell after us. Nobody did. Instead, the adults and my brothers stood there watching the whole scene, completely mesmerized like birds staring into the eyes of a snake. 

As the old man walked, we crept ever closer til we were right beside him. He didn’t acknowledge us, not even with a passing glance, he only turned his head away from his work to spit. After maybe 20 minutes of walking, I saw the branch in his hands begin to jerk and move. I turned to meet my sister’s wide eyes and we covered our mouths, not daring to make a peep. We were raised under the ‘children should be seen and not heard’ arrangement and, even then, we took care to not violate that. I watched the dousing rod go up and down like a dog sniffing for something to bark at, it whizzed around and made the old man’s motions look slower by contrast. His hands were steady and, with every step, that stick writhed wild as a rattlesnake, it looked like he had hold of Satan’s tail. After a few short steps, the dousing rod suddenly shot down hard as if pulled by an invisible hand. I watched the old man struggle with it like a game of tug of war that seemed strong enough to drag the Water Witcher straight to Hell. We stood looking at it almost as if to give it room to change it’s mind but it didn’t. The old man removed one hand from the rod and as he did the stick fell lifeless, stiff, and ordinary; not at all like the powerful tool it was just seconds before.

He hollered out “This’it here” as he took a handkerchief out of his back pocket and held it to his face, he patted the sweat off his neck and told us to find him a rock. We scattered like rabbits until my sister found a suitable heavy stone. The man nodded to the splayed cloth laid out on the ground and once she set that rock down on top of it us girls ran back to Dad, talking a million miles a minute about how the old man was a witch. Dad hushed us while Mama and Mrs. Hazel exchanged polite smiles. I quietly took my place along side them and solemnly watched as a crooked figure slowly moved to join us under the shade trees.

The next day, that same drilling contractor came back out to the farm and when dad told him there wasn’t going to be a surveyor to join him he was confused. I can only guess at his incredulity about some rubes probing for a well having forgone a surveyor’s guidance. I imagine he shook his head when the dusty farmer told him where he was to drill that morning. I can picture the contrast of his expensive modern machine being guided by a limestone rock set atop a handkerchief, that nailed it down on the earth in defiance of the wind and in spite of the times. Dad loved to tell the story about how our well was witched, how the fancy machine hit water 118ft down, and about the look on that contractor’s face when he walked up to give the news. Dad would hoot and holler recalling how he had asked the man to show him, “Right there under where that handkerchief was?” Finishing the tale cackling, “Well, son, I’ll be damned!” 

There are people around here who still plant by the stars, men who still hunt in accordance of the moon, and women who still wash their faces in the morning dew to stay beautiful. But every year there are less of us keeping to the old ways, less of us stubbornly holding on to this inheritance, refusing to let it be forgotten by a modern world which sees it as irrelevant. I’m homesick for the people who understood that they didn’t understand but who weren’t afraid to say what they saw, and those who didn’t demand anyone explain the unexplainable at the risk of being thought of as backwards or stupid. I smile at the incredulous faces when I tell the story of how our well was witched, and I know that Dad told it better but maybe Wendell Berry told it best: 

“I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts, and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing, and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven’s favor, in spite of the best advice.”

Wendell Berry