The Gift That Keeps On Giving–In Praise of Dowsers

A reprise, in large part, of a previous post, updated with more recent concerns, the most immediate of which has been this weekend, or even just this morning.

One of my favorite childhood stories was that of The Town Mouse and The Country Mouse.  There’s never been any doubt in my mind  which side of the marker fence I fall on; as one of the little friends says to the other at the end of the Aesop’s lesson:

“You may have luxuries and dainties that I have not, but I prefer my plain food and simple life in the country with the peace and security that go with it.”

I’ve been blessed, for the last 38 years, to live in the country.  Oh, not so far out that I can’t get to civilization when I want to or need to.  I have all the modern conveniences, although the ‘country’ implementation of a few of them are hella expensive and don’t always work as well as their wired counterparts.  I’ve ditched my satellite TV.  And I’m struggling with my satellite Internet.  And the cellular phone service isn’t great, or even especially reliable.  But, aside from the fact that my physical location puts me, comms-wise, somewhere between ‘smack in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle,’ and ‘over there on the dark side of the moon’,** I have everything I could possibly need, ready to hand.  I have excellent neighbors, and I try to be one myself.  And I’m well within reach of extraordinarily good healthcare, schools, and other necessary services.  Between what strikes me as an ideal location, and the ability to procure almost anything online and have it delivered right to my front door (bought my first ‘mattress-in-a-box’ online last year–incredible!), I’m blooming right where I planted myself, and have no intentions of up-staking and going anywhere else, any time soon.

I had a beloved friend (she died in 2022) who was the very definition of a town mouse, and who’d never been able to get her head around the fact that people who live in the country dig a hole on their property somewhere, and water comes out.  She was also deeply uncomfortable with the fact that the roads (many of which aren’t even two cars wide, and some of which are still gravel), don’t have sidewalks.  For those reasons alone, and although she visited often and enjoyed the quiet, the birds, the bees and the butterflies, I never thought she’d move next door.

I wrote the following post on Ricochet several years ago.  It tells the story of Mr. Right’s and my own move to the country, and how our well came to be.  I think of Harry Lindley often, always with thanks, and even more so ever since our farm was undermined by the coal company in 2018.  Many of my neighbors lost their wells, as is evidenced by the sprouting up of that (hopefully temporary) country solution to the “no-water” problem, the 1,500 gallon water tanks prominently on view next to the house, and the regular visits from the water delivery company with tanker trucks, and something resembling a fire hose, to fill them up (I don’t think you can buy water in that quantity online, at least, not yet.)

I didn’t lose my well.  And for that I credit Harry Lindley, diviner extraordinaire.  Here we go, from April of 2017:

Those of you who’ve been kind enough to read a few of my posts probably know that I cherish the many eccentrics in both my birth family and the family I chose through marriage.

Occasionally, I like to think I have my own place in this august pantheon, although it is hard to measure up to people like Great-Uncle Harold who died from a hernia after trying to lift his horse over a padlocked gate that the beast refused to jump, or Mr. Right’s Aunt Mary, the hermaphrodite dwarf. Or my dad. Always my dad.

One of the more memorable moments in my continuing, but often frustrating, efforts to prove myself worthy of my forebears occurred in 1986, when Mr. Right and I suddenly found ourselves living in a tent in the corner of a Southwestern Pennsylvania field.

We’d sold the house in Pittsburgh, where we’d lived in for six years, for less than we paid for it (we’d paid $7,200; we sold it for $5,500), to people we knew, because we wanted to make sure the new owners would fit into the neighborhood.  And they did.  Not all that long after we sold it, the house was demolished, and–all these years later–it remains a vacant lot.

Truth be told, it wasn’t much of a house. I’m sure it started out as a miner’s shack on what used to be known as “Coal Hill,” and at some point it had a kitchen downstairs and a bathroom upstairs tacked on, one above the other. It had a very nice double lot, and I made a pretty garden, and it was tastefully and scenically situated right on top of the exhaust fans for the mile-long Liberty Tunnels going under and through, Pittsburgh’s Mount Washington.

It was on a dead-end street in all senses of the phrase, and as our kind and friendly elderly neighbors died off, or sold homes they and their families had lived in most of their lives and moved to retirement communities, the neighborhood, like the street itself, went downhill fast.

During the few years we lived there, we quickly found ourselves on a first-name basis with the many Pittsburgh police officers we called regularly so that they could round up or disperse the drinking parties, drug deals, domestic disputes and sundry joys of life on the other side of the tracks. We learned that they didn’t really like coming down our way, and hadn’t, ever since they answered a call to a “domestic” across the road from us and arrived to find that the husband had locked himself in the bathroom, and that the wife was standing across the landing from it with a dozen or so knives, throwing them at the door with the verve, and accuracy, of a highly-trained circus performer.

And then there was the day I came home from work to find a gaggle of my neighbors and their friends, drunk as lords and high as kites, standing in the road around the bed of a large pickup truck into which they’d thrown two emaciated pit bulls, which they were betting on in a fight to the death.

That day, I parked my car diagonally in the middle of the street above them (so they couldn’t leave, because dead-end), marched down the hill past them and into the house, and called the police yet again. That was the day that quite a few of our neighbors went away for some time, and, even more usefully, Animal Control, and the local Humane Society became involved in patrolling the area.

Things improved somewhat after that.

But, I digress.

Back to the field. There we were, a considerable distance from the nearest utility pole or pipeline, with only a tent to our name, about to embark on a huge adventure: building our own house in the country.

One of the first problems to be solved, when you’re so foolhardy as to do what we did, is to find, capture, and deliver, a convenient and reliable supply of that life-sustaining liquid without which none of us could survive very long.

Whiskey

Water.

So we thought about that, and how we might do that. Then, completely out of ideas, we did what we should have done in the first place, and what any sane and rational people in similar circumstances would do. We drove up the hill to see our new neighbors (very different from our old ones), and we sought advice.

And that is how Mr. Right came to find himself standing in the field, a few days later, with Harry Lindley, the local water witch.

Water witches, diviners, or dowsers practice the ancient art of finding water underground with the assistance of a ‘dowsing rod’ which, in Harry Lindley’s case, was an ancient wand originally from a peach tree, lavishly and lovingly repaired and held together with exorbitant amounts of duct tape. The gentleman himself was slight, elderly, and taciturn, dressed in tattered overalls, and with a face like a carved apple doll.

Once the preliminaries were out of the way (they didn’t take long), he walked the hillside for several minutes, muttering intently. Then, suddenly, it happened, just up the hill from the recently excavated hole in the ground where, we hoped, our house was soon going to be. The tip of the peach wand swung sharply towards the ground, and Harry Lindley stopped.

“Here,” he said. “Dig here. There’s two rivers underground here that cross each other. There’s good water. Dig here.”

So, we did.

Our magician left us, and men with large and noisy late nineteenth-century technology moved in. Eighty feet down, they found it. A marvelous, clean, plentiful, supply of pure, sweet water which has never abandoned us, even in the driest of summers, and which has hydrated, kept clean, and refreshed our family and livestock for over three decades now, apparently with no end in sight (pace, frackers and the coal company).

This was Harry Lindley’s gift to us.

Because dowsers believe their special ability is, itself, a “gift,” those who practice it will accept no monetary reward for their services. Harry Lindley did enjoy a cigar with Mr. Right, though, and the two of them sat for quite a while on the soon-to-be porch steps, exchanging stories of the old days, the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. They had a marvelous time.

I’ve always believed in the importance of, and the beneficial effects of, saying “Thank You” to those who’ve done me a good turn. In general, I don’t think we I do it nearly enough. I’m trying to do better.

And, with that in mind, it’s well overdue, at this late date, that I should say, in a very public way:

Thank you, Harry Lindley, for your long-lasting gift to us. Mr. Right and I still raise a toast to you every so often with the other water of life. We don’t forget.

Thank you.

**I always say that I live in the little hamlet of “Limited Service, Pennsylvania.”  Because if you look at the all those maps showing the extent of the nation-wide cellular coverage from the various cellular providers (orange, red, green, etc.), I am in one of the gray areas that is specified in the key as “Limited Service.”  On all of them.

2024 Update:

Lord.  Spent the last three days in what might be called “Well Hell.”

Things had been getting a bit fraught around here, water-wise, and I’d been noticing my well pump running almost continuously, every time I opened a tap or turned on the dishwasher or otherwise consumed water either inside or outside the house when I was within hearing distance of either the switch or the pump. (You do start to notice such things after a while, especially if you’re on your own, and have nothing else to think about besides when your okra will flower or if your chickens will start to peck at and destroy their own eggs….)

The net effect on the receiving end was very poor water pressure, and increasing worry that the well might be failing.

Eventually it occurred to me that the pressure tank under my stairs might have worn out its welcome, and that perhaps the problem might lie there.  (The late Mr. Right and I installed it almost 20 years ago, so it’s not as if it owed us anything.)

I hotfooted it down, two days ago, to my local plumbing company and explained all the ins-and-outs.  They agreed with my diagnosis, and sent a lovely young man out yesterday (Friday) to replace the pressure tank.

As it turned out, I needed a new switch, too, and things took a bit longer, and were a bit more expensive, than I had hoped.  Still, it all got done, and after my new best friend left, I had a lovely shower–crimenutely, the water shot out of the showerhead and almost hit the back of the stall–did a load of dishes, and went to bed.

This morning (Saturday), I woke up with fantasies of doing the several loads of laundry I’d held back on because of the water situation, and the other load of dishes, to discover that my pressure tank was empty, my well wouldn’t pump, and that no water was coming out of any tap, anywhere on the property.

Argh.

At 8AM (when they opened) I called the same plumbers and explained.  A young man was here by 9:30.  I believe he’s cracked the case.

He bled a few pounds of air out of my pressure tank, explaining that sometimes the “recommended” settings don’t work, and if the pressure isn’t agreeable to the pump which is about 100 feet down the well, it won’t turn on and start to pump water uphill.  Once he’d done that, my pump miraculously revived, and–so far, at least–all seems good.

There’s plenty of water.

Once again, Harry Lindley, I salute you.

Bless.

(Also, mad props to McKean Plumbing and Heating in Washington PA.  Immediately responsive to my first request for service, competent in resolving it, and they fixed the resultant problem quickly and efficiently at no additional charge.  Can’t ask for more than that.)