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Article Excerpt
If the drillers had not overlooked the small pile of rocks that Edith Greene had painstakingly heaped in the center of the field, the people of Montgomery, Vermont, would today be enjoying all the clean, fresh drinking water they could ever want and she, as the dowser who had found it for them, would still be a town hero. Of this Edith is certain.
On the morning in 2004 when Edith first dowsed the field, the weather was blustery and bright. It was April, and though the late northern spring had yet to arrive, the air carried the first raw whiffs of thawing mud and melting snow. Under her boots, the half-frozen earth, still matted with the shorn remains of last summer's cornstalks, gave slightly with each step. If it had been much muddier or the ground more uneven, Edith might not have been able to come out at all. Though she had lost none of her youthful energy, as close to 80 as she was, she had to be careful.
Edith made her way slowly to the center of the field. The wind cut through the seams in her old pink jacket and tossed the steel gray curls escaping from her knitted green tuque. Her cheeks glowed beneath the round plastic frames of her glasses. Thank God it was not colder. You can't dowse with gloves on, and more than once she'd left a job with dangerously frozen fingers.
Like many modern dowsers, Edith never uses a forked divining rod to do any kind of serious work. "Oh, God, they're back to the sticks," she'll say in her rusty-hinge voice at a mention of these. "No one would do it like that anymore." She prefers L-rods, sometimes one, sometimes a pair. Edith makes rods for friends by bending a fight angle a third of the way into a length of coat-hanger wire and slipping the short end into a loose-fitting handle of plastic pipe; the sky blue tubing used by maple sugar makers looks especially nice, she finds. Her own favorite rods are made of faux-copper wire with molded-plastic handles; she bought them from a New Hampshire dowser who uses the proceeds to fund water-finding missions in the Third World. The L-rods are all of the same design; the handles prevent even the most tightly clenched fist from controlling the wires' motion. In the hands of an amateur, the rods swing wildly, the wires spinning inside the loose handles like an old-fashioned radar transmitter gone berserk. Experienced dowsers steady the rods so that the tips are pointing straight ahead, parallel and still. From this starting position, the wires may cross, or slant in tandem, or swing apart like doors thrown wide by a sudden draft. In every case, the motion alerts the dowser to an invisible presence: underground water, but also sometimes gold, oil, minerals, or what some describe as "earth energies."
Edith was looking for water. She let her wrists sag expertly so that the tips of the wires pointed motionless toward the ground about two feet in front of her. She took a deep, centering breath and stood a little straighter. Then, she mumbled something to herself and went to work.
All morning, Edith watched her rods swing wide, again and again. Something strange--something big--was happening below, but she wasn't sure what. Lunchtime had come and gone, and the wind was starting to pick up. There was more to do, but she'd have to come back when she had more energy.
Had Edith finished dowsing the field that day, it's possible that her involvement in Montgomery's water problems would have ended there too. It's possible that rumors of her work would never have reached water officials around the state and left them shaking their heads in wonder. It's also possible that the citizens and leaders of Montgomery might have avoided running headlong into the controversy that started with their desperate search for water but ultimately forced their tight-knit community into a public divide they never wanted, one that forced them to pit the claims of one elderly woman against their own beliefs about the workings of the natural world.
But it was cold, she was tired, and she didn't finish. Edith headed back to her car, but not before leaving a few cryptic markers--reminders to herself, she later said, of the underground water she had sensed but not yet defined. She left a small pile of rocks at the center of the field, and a few dozen yards away, she tied a length of orange surveyors' tape to the end of a low branch.
Edith dowses around 50 wells a year, many for newly built houses. Those moving to rural Vermont from metropolitan areas where summoning fresh water requires nothing more than a twist of a tap are often surprised to realize that they are now solely responsible for providing their household's water. Is clean, plentiful water lying around underground, just waiting to be pumped to the surface?
In Vermont, the answer to this is yes and no: there is ground water almost everywhere; it's the quality and quantity that raise uncertainty. Instead of pooling in lakelike aquifers, Vermont's ground water runs through fissures in its solid bedrock, forming underground streams, some as wide as the bed of a pickup truck, others the width of a pencil eraser. The streams...
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