I ONCE HAD THE PRIVILEGE OF LIVING WITH A WELL. It was a civilizing influence. My wife was six months pregnant with our first child; we stayed in a farmhouse at the very top of a village in Spain. The stone-built well, an aljibe, was right outside the front door, on a flagstone patio shaded with a grape arbor. To the right of the door, a large window opened onto the kitchen. The broad shelf of this window was the way that water got into and out of the house. The cooking water went in through it; and we washed dishes in a pan directly on it.
Because we had no bathroom, we bathed in a large tub that we would fill with well water and set in the sun to warm. Alternatively, we used our host’s ingenious contrivance of a large bucket fitted with a shower spigot. After a day on the wall in the spring sun, it was hot. My wife had never been more beautiful to me than when she glistened like a golden pear in that tub on the stone patio, beside a little bed of bloodred claveles, Spanish chrysanthemums whose hue cannot be found anywhere else, that also fed on the waters of that well.
The well was the center around which radiated the spokes of our life there. Its failure would have meant the end of the home. All over the south of Europe, I have come on lovely houses fallen to ruin, and beside each, there is a dry well. For me as a foreigner, accustomed to American plumbing, it was some time before it occurred to me that the people had not just turned off the water when they left the house. The water had left them.
Yet as precious as a well is, it is also dangerous. The neat aljibe of our little house had a solid steel cover with a lock on it. At first we thought this was to keep people from stealing the water. It turned out it was meant to keep the well from stealing children.
No hole in the earth is a thing to be trifled with. Each leads to the subterranean waters. In 1980, a Texaco rig, drilling for oil beneath Lake Peigneur in southern Louisiana, accidentally penetrated the labyrinthine tunnels of a salt mine. Within eight hours, the entire lake had drained into the mine, taking with it eleven barges, a tugboat, more than seventy acres of land, and the drilling rig itself.
Next day, when the tide rose in the nearby Gulf of Mexico, nine of the barges popped back out of the ground as the lake refilled. The tugboat, the rig, and two additional barges remained underground, where doubtless they will someday delight and dismay an archaeologist studying the ancient twentieth century.
This grotesque event is a caricature of the worldwide soil processes by which life is oriented and maintained. There is in fact hardly a single spot on Earth that is not honeycombed with tunnels, some filled with water and others filled with air. The average channel has a diameter smaller than a human hair.
In the top layers of the soil, at least fifty percent of the channels are filled with air, the rest with water. Beneath these rests the “saturation zone,” where the groundwater fills all the channels. This zone is also called the “water table,” a poetically appropriate piece of scientific nomenclature that calls attention to a simple but often forgotten fact: We are all basically afloat.
The difference between a desert, a fertile field, and a swamp is not the presence or absence of water in the subsoil, but its availability. Free, loose exchange from depth to surface—the channels narrowing gradually from depth to surface—is the best recipe for a fertile soil. When it rains the water diffuses through the deep layers, from which it can be drawn upward again by capillary action as the soil surface dries.
The trouble comes where the water table lies too far beneath the surface. Then, no matter how beautiful the structure of the surface soil, it has not enough sucking power to draw the deep water up. Or perhaps a layer of tough, impermeable stone cuts off the deep water from the surface soil. In either case, the farmer or the homesteader is unhappy.
When human population pressure was less, people simply left these areas alone. Not anymore. For the past two hundred years, the globe’s lands-of-little-rain have come under increasing settlement pressure. Deep wells have become increasingly important. And with these pressures has come a class of people who claim to sense directly where the best, most easily available water is to be found underground: dowsers.
Dowsers pay attention to a group of sensations that in most of us have simply atrophied. How does dowsing work? “We live in a universe of waves,” says Terry Ross, a dowser from Vermont. “And we ourselves can generate waves that resonate with other waves. At a certain level of resonance, you get a response.” He has used most of the dowser’s tools— Y-rods, L-rods and hand-held pendulums—but he is convinced that the material is not crucial. “The rod is just a dial on the stick of the mind,” says Ross.
Essentially, dowsers claim that they can find you the sweetest water at the shallowest depth on your property. They do this by walking around holding some simple tool until the device indicates where the best, nearest water lies. There actually is a pull on the rod as you walk across the land with it. I myself have felt it happen, though I could not tell you whether or not I’d found upwelling water there.
Dowsers are aware that the Earth is a living being, with water circulating under her skin and rippling magnetism girdling her inside and out. Soils themselves are complex magnetical bodies, influenced by the size, the source, and the age of the soil particles. John Ruskin wrote a remarkable essay called “The Work of Iron,” in which he praised the colors that oxidized iron produces on the Earth’s surface. Invisible but more influential, perhaps, are the webs of magnetism transmitted through the same iron in stones and soils.
Indeed, William Gilbert, the discoverer of magnetism, was deeply impressed by the fact that though it could easily be measured as a field, it had no physically quantifiable matter. If you took a magnet and cut it in half, for example, each half did not possess half the magnetic field. Each possessed the original field.
To Gilbert, magnetism was to the Earth as a soul is to the human being: massless and invisible, yet more essential and indivisible than the physical nature. He knew that the whole Earth was a magnet, owing to its rotation upon an axis, and he connected this rotation to the pattern of day and night, thus making magnetism a co-creator of everything alive.
On Gilbert’s Earth, it would be little wonder if man, bearing copious iron in the haem of the blood, had not a magnetical sense capable of orienting itself to magnetic anomalies in and on the Earth. It is a well-known fact that birds, turtles, and other animals have such a sense. A homing pigeon taken a thousand miles from its roost and blinded—what an awful experiment!—will nonetheless find its way back to within a few feet of its native roost.
One scientist whom I interviewed about dowsing scoffed at the very possibility. Without prompting, however, he noted that animals studied in China do seem to be excellent advance predictors of earthquakes.
Nature, theologians say, is unlike man, in that she is not fallen. Animals and plants still experience the world as our first parents might have: not only for its visible and sensual properties but also for its invisible ones. Science tells us we are lords of Creation and that we know everything, but it would seem that our mental world is often more impoverished than that of an ant or a weed. The compass plant orients its whorls of leaves on the North-South axis.
We do not know the simplest things. We have given up a lot in order to be know-it-alls. No one can conceive today how the pyramids were built, how Giotto mixed his colors or how he drew a perfect circle free-hand, or how a tribe from the Polynesian Archipelago sailed repeatedly across open ocean and each time reached the Island of Hawaii, a feat rather like hitting the bull’s-eye with a BB from a hundred miles off. It isn’t that we have lost the technology. We are simply missing the inner resources that make for real craft.
I wrote an article about dowsing for The New York Times. The editors were vexed that I could provide no scientific corroboration. Readers sent me copies of the latest debunking reports, showing that there was no way dowsing could be anything but charlatanry.
But I have seen charlatans running the nightly news and major medical research foundations as frequently as I have seen them in dowsers’ circles. It is a false distinction. And it makes me very happy to think that there are people out there making the effort to get back into their guts the knowledge that, a millennium ago, perhaps whole populations had.
The groundwater is down there deep beneath a layer of granite. Mr. Ross is looking for a hole in the granite. I hope that he finds it. And I hope this only as a particular case of the hope that embraces other invisible findings as well. I hope to credit and to exercise more the sense that tells me for sure when a loved one is thinking of me, that unheralded sense of well-being that invades children, or the certain sense of disaster that sometimes causes me to avert it.
The motto of modern dowsing is “Indago Felix,” or “the fruitful search.” It wouldn’t be a bad motto for any life.