|
|||||||
 |
|||||||
|
|||||||
|
|
|
Water Whisperer “Want to help me find buried treasure?” asked a friend of mine. He was building a new home and had hired Randy Tofts, a veteran freelance dowser who lives in Roxbury, to help him locate water on his property. Intrigued, I drove over with my 13-year-old niece, Emma, who was as curious as I was about the so-called art of dowsing. The three of us tagged along as Tofts, armed with his tool of the trade—a Y-shaped branch, snipped that morning from a cherry tree on his property—did his thing. “I have the best luck with branches from fruit trees,” Tofts explained. Dowsing, a.k.a. “divining” or “water witching,” is an age-old practice (Confucius wrote about dowsing in 2500 B.C.) of locating buried water or gems without the use of scientific apparatus. According to Tofts, the movement of th Somewhat skeptical about this unscientific hocus-pocus, my friend, who needed several wells drilled to accommodate both domestic water use and irrigation, first sent Tofts in the direction of a known water vein. “I wanted to test him to see whether he could detect water where I knew it was,” he confided. Sure enough, Tofts’ branch bent and pulled toward the earth as he approached the spot. “That is so freaky,” Emma whispered, and I had to agree. Over the course of the next hour, Tofts identified a total of five prospective well sites. At the fifth site, he asked us if we’d like to try. First, Tofts held the right side of the upside down Y-shaped branch, and I held the left. We held hands in the center. As we walked forward, the upstanding point of the branch bent toward the earth. It felt like a magnetic force was pulling it downward. Freaky, indeed! Finally, Tofts sent me off toward another known vein, holding the branch on my own. As I got closer, I felt the branch pull toward the earth. Yikes! Could I truly be a water witch? Emma and I giggled as we left Tofts, under the impression that I might really have the ability to divine water and other hidden treasures. But, I started to wonder, what if making the branch rotate was like using a Ouija board in middle school to find out if your crush really likes you and miraculously the pointer moves toward Y-E-S. I knew the water vein was there, so did I subconsciously rotate the branch? When I got home, I Googled “dowsing” and discovered that for every serious site about the phenomenon, there was at least one skeptical site. For example, according to the New England Skeptical Society, water witching has been thoroughly discredited by the National Water Information Clearing House. “Good citizens pay countless thousands for these con artists to tell them where to dig wells on their land, when in fact, there is water in almost all areas of [New York and Connecticut] at depth,” says Perry DeAngelis, an NESS representative. Back at my friend’s building site, only four of Tofts’ five prospective sites were drilled, since the first four successfully produced water. Would they have hit water anywhere on the site, if they drilled deep enough? Who knows? But, I’d be willing to come back with a fruit tree branch of my own to see what else I can divine. By Jennifer Moore Stahlkrantz |
e branch in his hands would tell him where the buried veins of water flowed. Apparently, one’s ability to dowse is based on one’s metabolism—“either you have it or you don’t,” he stated.