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Dowsing: Some Things in Life Can’t Be Explained
Dowsing: Some Things in Life Can’t Be Explained
By Linda Roberts
With a Y-shaped cherry branch, the forks held in each hand, Cathy Zimmerman walks across the front yard of her home near St. Louis in Loudoun County. She wants to show me something. There’s tension in her hands that hold tightly to the forks. Its stem pulls slightly downward toward the ground.
We look at each other. “There have been times that the pull is so strong the stick breaks,” she added, noting that she is generally out in a field when she searches for water.
“The water line to the house crosses right here,” she said, inviting me to repeat the same exercise. Sadly, I did not get the same result. In fact, the divining rod was just a stick in my hands. For Zimmerman, it had taken on a life of its own.
She’s one of a select group of people called “dowsers”— those who have the ability to locate underground water using a forked branch or even a wire dowsing rod. She’s even been called a water witch, a term going back to Colonial times when fear of dowsers and their seemingly magical powers ran rampant.
“There are all sorts of theories on why it works,” said Zimmerman, adding with a smile, “but no one really knows for sure.”
Dowsing has been practiced for centuries. The ancient Egyptians, Babylonians and Chinese left images of their work. Today, the internet claims that there could be as many as 60,000 dowsers in America, all with the goal to seek water. There are other dowsers who look for buried metals and other underground “treasures” with divining rods.
Zimmerman first experienced dowsing some 40 years ago when trying to locate water at her new home.
“There was an old man here who tried using a tree branch (to find water), but he only found two dry wells,” she said. “I picked up the stick he was using and tried it, and it worked. We found water and dug our well that yields 60 gallons a minute.”
She believes, in her case, that dowsing may have something to do with her body magnetism. As an aside, she said, “watches always stop for me after about six months, and I have to throw them out and get another.”
Finding water with her cherry branch can take “all day or sometimes a half hour,” she added, emphasizing that using a wire divining rod doesn’t work for her. She prefers a branch from a fruit tree, especially cherry, because so many cherry trees grow on her Buttonwood Farm where she lives on 150 acres with husband Tad, a Joint Master of the Piedmont Hunt.
Zimmerman, a talented and widely recognized watercolor artist, links her creative, artistic side with her ability to find water, saying that there is “some sort of sensitivity at work for me. I think there must be a common denominator.
“Hats off to modern technology to find water. But I think my stick works pretty well.”
