Good Well Hunting

HEWITT

y the first of May, the last vestiges of the mildest winter in memory are long departed. I cannot recall a winter of such enduring timidity, and although I’m grateful for all the ways in which it made our lives easier during the inherent challenges of home building, I also feel a certain loss. There’s a particular satisfaction in making it through a real Vermont winter, in sticking it out to the bitter end of the below-zero nights and the bottom of the woodpile with your mental and physical well-being intact. Or one out of two, at least.

This spring, however, there’s none of that. We’d had nothing to endure but the lack of winter itself; why, the pipes in the unheated pantry of our new house froze only once. What’s more, they didn’t even burst! It’s an outrage, really.

Now, with the frost out of the ground and the first cutting of hay stacked neatly in the barn, we’re faced with a hard decision. For months we’ve been suffering the unpalatable water that our spring produces. At first, in the early weeks of developing the spring, we assumed the off taste was due to soil disturbance and the presence of decomposing organic matter. I took the excavator to the spring and scraped off all visible topsoil and forest detritus, replacing it with clay from the bottom of our pond site. But these efforts proved fruitless, as the water continued to smell and taste like an egg left in the sun too long, and it soon became clear that we’d inadvertently developed a sulfur spring. We installed a large carbon water filter in the house; within two weeks, the sulfur had overcome it. At $60 per filter, this is no long-term solution.

It’s difficult to overstate how discouraged I am by this turn of events. In the grand scheme of things, developing a sulfur spring ranks pretty low on the hardship scale, but the spring had been a source of pride for me. I’d never developed a spring before, but for this one I had my hands on every step of the process, learning as I went, all the while anticipating the unending stream of crystalline water soon to flow into our new home. Equally painful was the fact that we dumped better than $3,000 into the project. That’s a steep toll for water that turns the nose from a dozen feet.

The decision isn’t whether we should drill a well now—that’s pretty much a given—but rather where we should drill. That’s because there are never any guarantees when one drills for water. Drill over here, and you might hit water at 100 feet; drill over there, and it might be 300 feet. Or more: Just a stone’s throw from our place—far, far too close for comfort— there’s a 600-foot dry well. Given that the current price for drilling runs about a dozen bucks per foot, the implications are obvious. So, we decide to hire a dowser. And that, in short, is how we meet John Wayne Blassingame.

Blassingame arrives on an idyllic early summer morning, the sky azure blue above, the grass verdantly green underfoot. Within minutes, Penny and I know the following about him: He is 89 years old (though he doesn’t look a day older than 70), he’s found water in 26 states, he was drafted into the Navy right out of high school, and he has a 14-year-old biological daughter. The last seems a particular point of pride, and, honestly, who can blame him?

“It’s all about tuning into the subconscious,” explains Blassingame, when I ask about the tenets of successful dowsing. “The subconscious knows all sorts of things.” Furthermore, it’s critical to know the limitations of the practice. “It’s got to be sincere,” he says, as he extracts copper dowsing rods from a case in the bed of his truck. “It’s got to be based on need, not greed, or it won’t be accurate. And you can’t infringe on someone’s personal life.” He tells us about the time he was giving a dowsing workshop and a woman tried to dowse whether her husband was having an affair. “I grabbed those rods right out of her hands.”

Blassingame has brought along homemade rods for both Penny and me because he wants “our energy in it.” He hands us each a set of rods; they’re maybe 16 inches long, with a 6-inch-long L to be held in the hand. Over each L he’s installed a copper sleeve; this allows the rods to rotate freely in our hands. The first thing we do is “tune” our rods by explaining to them (yes, out loud) what we want them to do in response to our questions: cross tips when the answer is yes, and swing outward when the answer is no. We then ask a series of yes/no questions to which the answers are well-established fact. “Is my name Ben?” “Am I a little green frog?” And so on.

My rods provide the correct answer to every question, but this seems easy enough to dismiss. After all, it’s a very different thing to ask the rods if I’m a little green frog compared with ask- ing them if we’re standing atop a vein of potable water and, furthermore, whether that vein will produce a sufficient flow of water and, furthermore still, to gauge the approximate depth of that water. Yet Blassingame says we can do it, and who am I to doubt an 89-year-old with a daughter just out of junior high?