Parched Town Hopes Dowsing Serves It Well

Old-timers would say it’s the mysterious hand of God. New suburbanites might liken it to moving a cursor on an underground computer screen that only certain people can see.

Either way, folks in this tiny town about 50 miles northwest of Washington, D.C., are hoping the forked cherry branch, gripped in the gnarled hands of the 77-year-old farmer in the “Kickin’ Bass” cap, has guided him to what they sorely need: water. They and others are struggling with a drought the National Weather Service calls the region’s second worst in 70 years.

“I’ll be really tickled if the drillers find it,” said Dennis Flook, one of the handful of people in the region who practice the centuries-old folk tradition of dowsing--using a forked stick or other implement to guide them to ground water.

No one is sure how it works--and scientists say there’s no evidence it does work. But science apparently has failed Myersville. Hard up for water, like many other rain-starved towns in this hilly, hardscrabble part of the Mid-Atlantic, Myersville recently spent about $20,000 on the services of a geologist and an engineer.

“And I’ve got nothing to show for it but three dry holes,” complained Mayor Billy Eckstine last week.

So Myersville called on Flook and another Myersville man, Larry Doub, to dowse some new wells. In a week or two, once Eckstine gets the go-ahead from state officials, he plans to bring in drillers and see what’s under the spot that Flook’s cherry rod liked so much.

“These boys are good local people; I figured I might as well give ‘em a try. They can’t do any worse than the experts,” Eckstine said.

Flook makes no guarantees but allows as how he’s got a pretty good batting average: “I’ve done about 20 of these jobs, and I only missed twice.”

Dowsers are doing a brisk business these days.

“When was the last time I dowsed? This morning!” said Fred McIntosh, 81, a former Air Force pilot who estimates he has pointed drillers to about 430 spots and found good water at most of them. Developers crow about McIntosh, who uses a map, a pendulum technique and a plastic Y-rod.

“It seems a little like hocus-pocus and voodoo, but he’s helped us with 50 or 60 houses I know of. . . . His success rate’s been 95% to 98%,” said Greg Harrison of W.G. Harrison of Leesburg, Va., near Washington. “And it’s not easy to find water here.”

Charles Shephard, environmental health manager for the Rappahannock-Rapidan Health District of Fauquier County, Va., said he’s been criticized for speaking too highly of the dowsers’ abilities so has toned it down. “They’re right. It eludes strict science, but I hate to say there’s nothing to it,” he said. “I have seen it succeed.”

Myersville has never overflowed with water. Perched on dense basalt, it gets water from a hodgepodge of sources--ground water from six wells, surface water from Catoctin Creek, even spring water drawn from the mountains in pipes laid in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration.

Lately the creek is a trickle, and well levels have dropped so low the town banned outside watering. When similar restrictions were imposed two years ago, Town Councilman Robert Lowry said, “people were tattling on each other. It got pretty ugly.”

Frustrated with Myersville’s water problems, Mayor Eckstine recently took Flook and Doub to Ashley Hills, one of several new housing developments that have sent the farm town’s population soaring from about 400 to 1,300 in eight years. The developer drilled two wells there, Eckstine said, and one of them “just up and quit two years ago.”

Flook said it was easy to find the spot where he has advised the town to drill. His trusty cherry wand--a forked stick about 20 inches long, with the girth of a fat pencil--is never ambiguous.

“That thing just pulls my arms down when I hit water,” he said. “I know it, ‘cause I can’t hold the stick up. Sometimes I’m gripping so tight, the bark snaps off.”

Doub, who uses two L-shaped metal rods, came up with the same spot--a common area with gazebos and small trees.

Flook demonstrated his technique recently on his front lawn, grabbing each side of the Y-shaped stickand thrusting the point up at a 90-degree angle. The minute he got to the town water line that runs past his house, it swung down. Is there some special mental focus or visualization needed?

“I don’t think about a thing,” said Flook, who learned the technique from others in the area. “Not everybody can do it.”

There is a formal dowsing organization with an Internet site where novices can learn about dowsers through the ages (Moses, the Egyptians), buy assorted divining devices (brass L-rods, wooden pendulums) and ponder why it works (Flook holds with the gift-from-God theory).

“There’s a bit of tension between the old-timers and the New Agers,” said Gloria LaBorie of the Vermont-based American Society of Dowsers.

But they share a love of the lore--how dowsers have found unexploded land mines, how some say the rod must be cut under a full moon, or that it works best if the dowser wears golf spikes.

Flook’s a bit overwhelmed by all the attention since the mayor spoke about his dowsing at a recent town meeting. Fortunately, wife Mary Elizabeth Flook keeps him down to earth.

“Don’t forget, they haven’t done the drilling, Daddy,” she said. “You may be made a liar yet!”