The Retirement of a Lifetime

With our rods tuned and our subconscious awareness on high alert, we turn to the task of finding water. Because we’d already buried lines from the spring to the house, our strong preference is to drill our well near enough to those lines that we can simply tap into them, rather than trench for new lines all the way from well to house.

Blassingame instructs me to make a pass in the hoped-for vicinity. I walk slowly across the area, repeatedly asking, “Is there water here?” until the tips of my rods cross. It’s an astonishing moment; it feels almost as if I couldn’t stop the rods from crossing. I repeat the process, with the same result. Penny goes next, and her rods cross at the exact same spot. Blassingame confirms our finding, then homes in on depth (250 to 300 feet), palatability and potability (affirmative on both accounts), and flow (at least 8 gallons per minute). “Have them drill right here ,” he instructs, pounding a flagged stake into the ground. Within seconds, a butterfly alights atop it. This pleases Blassingame immensely. “That’s a good omen,” he says, and chuckles.

Apartment and cottage living at Piper Shores offers residents fully updated and affordable homes, with all the benefits of Maine’s first and only nonprofit lifecare retirement community. Located along the Southern Maine coastline, our active, engaged community combines worry-free independent living with priority access to higher levels of on-site healthcare—all for a predictable monthly fee.

It’s more than three weeks before the drilling rig arrives, and I cannot deny that over this period, doubt creeps in. I pass the stake multiple times each day, looking for some sort of clue that we’ve chosen the right spot. But to the naked eye there is nothing to differentiate this small square of ground from the millions of small squares of ground surrounding it. I wonder: Could Blassingame have scammed us? At $250, his services weren’t exactly cut-rate, especially considering he was on-site for less than two hours. A quick round of Googling reveals a study claiming dowsers are no more reliable than coin flips. If this is true, the $250 doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the lingering uncertainty over how deep we’ll ultimately need to drill. I console myself by recalling the butterfly, whose wings were deep blue—the color of water.

Turns out, we’re not able to be home the day the drillers arrive. When we return at 6:30, the rig is perched in our yard, the bit deep in the ground at the precise spot we’d installed the stake. I run inside to call the driller; I simply can’t bear waiting until the next day to find out how far they’ve drilled, whether they’ve hit water, and, if so, the rate of flow.

“We got to 165 feet,” the driller tells me. He pauses for dramatic effect, and I steel myself—surely, something must have broken. Then he continues, “And we hit 50 gallons per minute. At least that’s what I think it is. Honestly, it was coming in so fast, we could hardly measure it.” I cover the telephone mouthpiece and let loose a whoop. Fifty gallons a minute at 165 feet is better fortune than I even dared dream. And it’s far, far better than what Blassingame promised. For a brief moment, I consider calling him to alert him that perhaps those rods weren’t fully tuned. After all, we were wrong. But darn it all, at least we were wrong in the right direction.