(AND OTHER EXCITING TALES)
Did you hear the one about the dowser whose divining rod kept leading him into Chelsea’s Tap Room on 4th Street? A coalition of scientists, nimbies and his competitors tried to get his dowsing license revoked until he proved in fact that Chelsea’s was watering down their whiskey.
Dowsing, which used to be called “water witching.” has been officially declared to be a pseudo-science by the fact-checking community, and if anybody ought to know about pseudo-science, it’s the fact-checking community.
I myself have a more broad-minded view of dowsing, and many other things, willing to give proponents a chance to present their case. (Just a chance, mind you, which you can use up. The world is not flat. Other examples of lost chances would include various of my old girlfriends. They had their chance.)
Anyway, I perked up when, during a recent boring meeting of the Union Grove Farm leadership team when our new uber-qualified Vineyard Manager, Tim Lindquist, announced that we were going to use the services of a dowser to check on the pattern of underground water resources in some of UG’s newer fields. Tim’s got 35 years in the business, so the rest of the team deferred to his judgment, especially since most of his experience is in California, where water is as scarce as turkey teeth (except in San Diego, where they’ve been smart enough to put in a big desalination plant and thereby get the whole durned Pacific Ocean for a reservoir.)
Why the Union Grove leadership wants me to attend these team meetings is a mystery to me, since I have nothing, except an occasional snarky bon mot, to contribute to the discussion What, after all, do I know about vermicompost, fertigation, or the advisability of purchasing a new Uerschel Model Sprint 2 Dicer? Or the spread of something called the Tree of Heaven throughout Orange County? I understand that Trees of Heaven are evil, evil plants, in spite of their divine appellation, because UG is determined to destroy every single one of them, literally root and branch. Apparently, they attract Spotted Lantern Flies, an insect that has, as it’s Number Two favorite food, the T of H -- Number One being, uh oh, grapevines!
But I digress.
I should really start by pointing out that Union Grove Farm would rather get all its water from surface sources, which is why no fewer than nine ponds have been built on the property. But there are a few places where that just can’t be done, including Little Cheek field, which is where our story takes place, so the only option is to drill, baby, drill.
I was, unfortunately, unable to be on hand the day the dowser, Dale Miller, came to Union Grove to work his magic. Or science. Or whatever. But Tim showed me his report, a fancy, illustrated loose-leaf notebook, with color-coded maps of various Union Grove fields and vineyards. I couldn’t understand any of it, but Tim was impressed with the whole exercise.
“At one point,” he told me, “Mr. Miller was examining a piece of land, walking back and forth over it with his divining rod. I asked him what he was doing at that moment, and he said, ‘talking with the land’ and so I asked what it was saying and he said, ‘well, if the end of the rod goes down, that means yes, but if it goes up, that means no.”
Here I inserted one of my crudest bon mots, one of which I am not proud and will not repeat - but it did get a good laugh from the momentarily all-male audience.
Anyway, Miller and his twitching divining rod eventually settled on a particular spot in Little Cheek Field, which happens to be less than a quarter of a mile from the famous Little House by the Vineyard, where I live. And where Miller took off his black, high pointed sorcerer’s hat, put his divining rod aside and donned a white lab jacket. (I don’t know that he actually did these things, but I’m speaking metaphorically here, which I have the right to do, being a poet laureate.) He then got out some real, non-pseudo, science equipment, a laser beam emitter and that sort of stuff, and after hitting a rock with the first beam, shot another, just a few inches away, and presto chango, there was the water, just 336 feet below the surface, and which, he was able to calculate, using other real science, would have a capacity of at least 21 gallons a minute, which doesn’t sound like a great amount when you first say it, but is actually a very considerable amount indeed, and more than adequate to irrigate the vineyards for which it is intended, and needed. So the whole project was a smashing success.
So does dowsing really work? Well, I could say that while it is a small sample size, my experience is that it works 100% of the time. So maybe it is science. Or maybe it’s magic.
When you get right down to it, as they say in the drilling business, I like to think this ole world isn’t so far gone into the clutches of cold, hard reason but what there is a little room left for some stardust. Dowse, baby, dowse.
I can’t promise you stardust, but if you’d like to see Union Grove Farm, ponds, grapevines, sheep, red wiggler worms and all the rest, just click here to sign up for one of our tours. You’ll have fun.
