Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself, thou fillest us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939
One summer in the early 1960s, a drought hit the coast of Maine, where my grandparents had built a log cabin on a point of land thirty years earlier. The water level in their usually reliable well suddenly dropped, and their pipes began to cough and go dry. Worried, they contracted a dowser, or water witch, to search for a new source.
The best dowser in the neighborhood was Mrs. Martha Willis, a young city-born woman who had married a Mainer and discovered that she possessed the power to divine veins of freshwater hidden deep underground. Her only tool was a freshly cut twig of swamp alder. Holding the trilimbed twig by its forked ends, with the longest limb pointed forward and level, she picked her way around the property, alert for a signal. Occasionally the stick would dip in a shallow indication of a source, but Mrs. Willis wasn’t satisfied. Eventually, she found two spots where the stick lunged toward the ground. “These look like good places,” she said. “Mark those spots with stakes.” Then, handing the twig to my grandmother, she said, “Here, you try it.”
My grandmother Fredericka Child wandered about with the stick but had only haphazard luck. Then my grandfather Charles Child tried it. Within a few paces, he recalled, “The fork plunged so hard in my [hands] it tore the bark off the twigs. It was a strange, rather compelling sensation…. I didn’t quite believe it even when it happened … but one must leave the door open to mystery…. The sensation is one of having an invisible hand reach up suddenly and pull the stick toward the ground as you pass over certain areas.”
Mrs. Willis was satisfied with the spot my grandfather found. Soon, a drill rig arrived and spent several days boring a hole into the granite. My grandparents hovered expectantly as the rig drilled 50 feet down, 75 feet down, then 100 feet down. Heaps of dust and mud were extruded from the borehole, but no water. The property was close to the ocean, and the drillers warned it was possible that they’d find nothing or undrinkable, brackish water filled with iron and silt.
After the second day of drilling, the hole was 150 feet deep but still dry, and the charm of the water witch began to fade. On the third day, my grandparents gave up and went out for lunch. When they returned home, the workmen were whooping and hollering: at a depth of 165 feet, they had hit a bulb of cool, fresh H2O, without a trace of silt or salt. There was so much freshwater that it gushed over the top of the drill casing in a steady stream.
“Water! Pure water! Limpid, liquid, looping, lovely water!” my grandfather wrote. “The first measurements showed we were getting a flow of more than six gallons a minute, or about 10,000 gallons a day…. we had a water-tasting ceremony in which all gulped in turn…. Hooray! … It was pure, clean and cold.”
My grandfather’s joy at finding a new source rings a bell, as he would say, deep inside. His reaction was instinctual and universal, something every human can relate to: Water!
Yet his glee is also a reminder of what is at stake every time we take a drink from the tap, wash off in the shower, hose our lawn, turn on the computer, douse a fire, or manufacture a computer chip. His exuberance at finding a new supply in a time of drought—“pure, clean and cold”—was also a sigh of relief, a shout of triumph over the primal terror of having nothing let to drink.