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Looking for Water with a Wand

By Ginger Miles

Three people are standing at the side of the yard watching a man as he walks along the grass slowly, almost as if he were a Buddhist monk in meditation. He is holding in his hands the two forks of a stick, the end of the stick pointing straight ahead. Suddenly he stops, just as the branch in his hand begins to point downward. Is he controlling the branch? Could it be moving by itself? As the branch moves down, the muscles in his arms flex, as if he's holding a dog pulling on a leash.

"I think I've found it!" he says.

What he's found is water. In times of drought, people resort to all kind of ways to find water. The Comanches, when no water was available, would cut open prickly pear and other succulent cacti. The generations of pioneers who trail blazed the dry lands of Texas later made wells. But how did they know where to dig?

One way of finding water is called "water witching," a practice that has been in use for centuries, some say since Biblical times. It's still in use today. Water witching is the ancient art of finding water through the use of a divining rod, an L rod or the forked branch of a tree. Early settlers used the witch hazel shrub in their search for water, thus the name "water witching." It has nothing to do with witchcraft.

Another word for witching is dousing. The first recorded douser was the Biblical character Miriam. "Wherever people went in the desert, there was always Miriam's well," says Dallas resident Bette Epstein, a fourth-generation water witch and president of the North Texas chapter of the American Association of Dowsers. "She could tell them where to dig, and there would be water."

Epstein is in her late forties, with blonde curly hair and a welcoming smile. As a hypnotherapist, she is particularly interested in alternative healing. She runs workshops on dousing and is teaching her teenage daughter to douse. The daughter practices in the back yard of the Epstein's North Dallas home.

Can anyone learn to douse? Epstein says it seems easier for children, who are more naturally accepting. "It's another sense, like taste or touch, an innate ability to know where things are," she says. Over the years she's learned to douse without an instrument and to key into her body reaction, which she describes as "educated intuition."

Epstein has doused almost 80 wells, and has had only one dry hole. She gets calls from developers who need wells in outlying areas before city water gets put in place.

Understandably, the parts of the country that make the most use of "water witching" to this day are the dryland farming areas, which are always hit hardest by the drought. Traveling from Dallas-Ft. Worth toward West Texas, the Metroplex radio signals begin to fade around Breckenridge. Water here is less plentiful. The first signs of mesquite and prickly pear appear on the horizon, and there is a 360-degree view of the West Texas sky.

Farm Road 600 leads to the farm of Hollis Muhlstein of Stamford. The house of reddish brick sits in a yard next to a large white barn made of corregated tin.Cotton fields stretch to the horizons in three directions, except for the backyard. Beyond the yard is a pasture of coastal Bermuda grass where Muhlstein keeps his two longhorns, Peggy and Linda.

Hollis Muhlstein and his sons ordinarily harvest as many as 2500 acres of cotton, but last year, because of the drought, they harvested only 70 acres. Water was so scarce that people were beginning to call on resources they hadn't thought of using for a long time. Muhlstein decided he needed to dig a well, so he called in his neighbor Wilbur Wilson to "witch" his land. Wilson is in his forties and is known in the community as someone who does witching, although he won't do it for money. Previously he worked as a lineman for Stamford Electric Co-op (now Big Country EC) and he now works at West Texas Utilities (WTU).

On Muhlstein's land, Wilson chooses a branch from a mulberry tree. When he witches for water, he takes a Y-shaped limb, bare of leaves, and holds the two ends of the "Y" while he walks across the land, mentally holding the desired goal (water) in his mind. Wilson found a spot near the house where the mulberry branch drew downward, as if being pulled by an unseen force. "Here's where you'll find your best water," he told Muhlstein.

To determine the depth of the well, Wilson knelt at the spot and shook the mulberry limb. As it began to sway up-and-down, he began to count how many "nods" it made. Each "nod" counts as one foot. This process is called "counting the nods."

"When it gets to the source of the water itself, it'll start moving sideways and then stop," he said, just as the limb stopped moving. "Should be able to drill to water about 34 feet down!"

Of course the only way to know if the "witching" is accurate is to actually drill a well. One of the most experienced water well drillers in the area is also a water witcher. For 45 years A. B. English of Aspermont, 35 miles northwest of Stamford, ran the E & C Drilling Company until he passed away in May of 1999. Now his son, Roger English, is in charge of the business. The younger English never approaches a well without witching; neither did his father, who taught him to water witch when he was seven years old.

"Dad started out using a Y-shaped limb of a mesquite, a peach, or a witch hazel, one branch (of the Y) in each hand," Roger English recalls. "You walk slowly across the field until the switch pulls down, and that's where you know you'll find water."

Now, rather than tree limbs, English uses aluminum "L" rods 24 inches long, which he carries in his truck on every job.

Water witching is not 100 percent accurate. English says he hits water on the first try more than 75 percent of the time. What happens in that 25 percent when he doesn't find water right away? His procedure works like this: After "witching" an area, he drills a test hole about an inch and a half wide to determine where the water is. It takes only 10 or l5 minutes. At the very most, he might have to make four or five holes.

"Once when Dad was drilling and coming up without anything but a dry hole, he stopped everything and went to get his witching sticks," English recalls. "He walked four feet off the site with the sticks, moved over from where he was drilling, and he found water."

Aren't some customers skeptical about this method of finding water?

"Most people out in the country have grown up knowing about water witching, and it works," English says. "That's all they care about."

The drilling business has been booming the last few years. "Like it or not," English says, "our business is much better during a drought. More people dig for wells."

The minimum charge for digging 60 feet or less is $650.

There are skeptics. Jim Bordovsky, an agricultural engineer in the Lubbock area who specializes in irrigation, describes successful water witching as an accident. ?I?ve not seen any scientific evidence that water witching will work," he says, "but I'm not saying that it won't work."

Bordovsky is also quick to explain that scientific methods are not always accurate either, whether it's using general table maps, geological equipment or sonic instruments that send electric currents through the ground. "Water should be considered a mineral," he says. "It's like looking for oil or gold. The use of scientific equipment increases the odds. But in most cases, just like a weather forecast, it's an educated guess."

There's no easy answer as to why and how water witching works. Some explanations connect the sensitivity of dowsers to small disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field. There are stories of telephone linemen who keep L rods in their van and douse for broken underground cable. And there are stories of Marines in Viet Nam who doused with bent coat hangers for booby traps and land mines.

Regardless of why it works, the ancient art of water witching and dousing is being revitalized by New Age thought and by the force that brought it to being in the first place: Survival.

Hollis Muhlstein isn't certain whether he wants to drill a well. Last summer brought more rain than the summer before, but with predictions that the drought may persist, maybe looking for water with a wand might not be such a far-fetched idea.

Stamford native Ginger Miles lives in New York City, where she produces radio documentaries.

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