By Lily Raff • The Bulletin

PRINEVILLE —

The year is 2007, and building a new home involves a team of experts — architect, carpenter, plumber and, sometimes, witch.

To, you know, find water.

Even in this age of science and technology, some people still believe in water witching enough to bet their well on it. Instead of a geologist or engineer, they hire a water witch — also called a dowser — to choose the best location for their well.

Dowsers don’t carry licenses, so it’s hard to find data about the practice. But those who follow it closely say it’s a dying art. Witches — and, in many cases, their customers — are an aging bunch. The pool of water witches, in other words, is slowly drying up.

Here in Central Oregon, wells used to be the primary source for drinking water. And witching for the best place to site a well used to be the norm, too.

About 700 wells were drilled in the Deschutes River basin last year, according to the state Water Resources Department. Builders generally employ hydrogeologists or engineers to find underground sources of water. Or drillers site the wells themselves.

There are a handful of locals, however, who still work as water witches. They use pendulums or divining rods, rather than geological data and maps of average well depths.

Water witching is usually a modest industry. Dowsers drum up business by word of mouth and by small signs posted in front yards. Here, they’re not even listed in the phone book.

Carl Huntley, of Prineville, for example, drives a red pickup bearing magnetic signs that read: “Water/well witching — will travel.”

“A lot of people think you’re nuts,” he said. “One time a guy asked me, ‘Do you ride a broom?’ And I said, ‘I wish I could, ’cuz it’s sure as hell cheaper than driving a truck.’”

Huntley, who is now 68, had just gotten out of the Army in 1965, when he first discovered that he was a witch.

His uncle, Gordon Huntley, who is now deceased, had been a gifted water witcher.

“He even found silver, gold and cinnabar mines,” his nephew said. “I don’t go that far. I just do water.”

After watching his uncle handle a divining rod one day, Huntley tried and it worked.

According to Huntley, water witching isn’t a learned skill. It’s a gift that either you’re born with or you’re not. Huntley was born with it, he says. And a long — and still growing — list of happy customers agrees.

Leslie Beard, a Prineville real estate agent, said she regularly refers clients to him.

Huntley charges $100 per hole — or well site — he locates. If he paces up and down a property without detecting any water, he doesn’t charge a dime. A rough, retired mill worker, Huntley said water witching is basically a hobby that brings in a few bucks every once in a while.

He witches by holding the shorter end of a thin brass welding rod, bent into an L shape. He holds the longer end of metal parallel to the ground. He slowly starts to walk. Suddenly, the rod swings around and points in a different direction. According to Huntley, that means he has passed over an underground stream. The rod points in the direction the water is flowing, he said.

Next, he picks up another brass welding rod, this one bent into a V shape. He holds both ends of the rod and bends close to the ground, over the spot where he previously detected water. As he bends down, the rod dips and jumps. Each vibration corresponds to 1 foot of earth between the surface and the water source.

During a recent visit to Pioneer Park in downtown Prineville, Huntley demonstrated his craft. As the V-shaped rod bounced up and down, Huntley crouched down and counted the vibrations. Then he stood back up.

“The water is about 20 feet down,” he said.

Huntley claims he has never been wrong about a well.

Mysterious origins

Historians are unsure how the modern tradition of dowsing started. Its origins are almost certainly widespread. Dowsing was prominent in ancient cultures from Egypt to native America.

The traditional instrument for water witches is a forked willow branch.

Most dowsers today use pendulums or divining rods — made of wood or metal — to answer a question. Arvid Johnson, operations manager for the American Society of Dowsers, prefers a pendulum, himself. And unlike water witches, who sell their services to the general public, Johnson, who lives in Vermont, only dowses for himself.

“Typically, you ask a question that can be answered yes or no,” he said. “You can’t ask for things like, what will the Megabucks number be? Dowsing in the future like that is generally considered poor strategy and not reliable.”

With the question in his mind, Johnson lightly holds the pendulum and starts it swinging back and forth. Gradually, the pendulum starts to swing in a circle. If it turns clockwise, the answer is yes. If it turns counter clockwise, the answer is no.

The American Society of Dowswers has about 3,300 members nationwide, Johnson said. As members have aged, few young people have joined.

“I’ll bet that close to 80 percent of (our members) are over 60 years old,” Johnson said.

In Prineville, Huntley said he knows two other water witches, and both are older than him.

One of the better-known dowsers in Central Oregon, Del Jones, died in late 2005 at the age of 82.

Mike Doney, 83, chairs the Oregon chapter of the American Society of Dowsers. He lives in Milwaukie, where monthly meetings are held under a tree next to a parking lot. Doney usually brings a roasted chicken to share, and the handful of other attendees bring side dishes. Sometimes they host a guest speaker.

Truth or tomfoolery?

Mainstream scientists say water witching is a figment of the imagination — like superstitions or palm-reading.

In 1917, the U.S. Geological Survey commissioned a study on dowsing. In it, a scientist named O.E. Meinzer refuted the practice after acknowledging that the agency received numerous inquiries each year as to whether and how dowsing worked.

“It is difficult to see how for practical purposes the entire matter could be more thoroughly discredited, and it should be obvious to everyone that further tests by the United States Geological Survey of this so-called ‘witching’ for water, oil, or other minerals would be a misuse of public funds,” he wrote.

Scientific opinion has, for the most part, remained steady.

“I have zero faith, zero belief in divining rods,” said Rodney Weick, a hydrogeologist for the state Department of Environmental Quality. “When it comes to water witching, you can go out just about anywhere there’s known groundwater — the La Pine area, Prineville, anywhere, basically — and start drilling and eventually you’ll hit water (but) it depends what depth and what volume.”

Weick said he has personally tried dowsing for utility pipes.

“I had more failures than I had success,” he said.

Some local well drillers roll their eyes when water witching is mentioned, too.

The state Water Resources Department has online records of average well depths across the state, they point out. Anyone could figure the average depth of a well and call themselves a witch.

Yet some dowsers veer into the scientific realm when offering their own explanations.

Doney, for example, said he believes that dowsers are tuned into another dimension. They’ve honed a sixth sense to complement sight, sound, taste, smell and touch.

Dowsing is “sensing a physical order just vibrating beyond ordinary view,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Huntley, on the other hand, chalks the whole thing up to electricity. He’s a super-charged person, he said — the batteries in most of his wristwatches die after a day or two of wear.

“Electricity really shakes me up,” he said.

According to Huntley, water running underground conducts magnetism from the North Pole. When a person with Huntley’s considerable voltage holds a metal rod and passes over the stream, the rod reacts.

If the amount of water is considerable, Huntley feels it even without holding the brass rod.

Dave Morgan, a hydrogeologist for the USGS who has studied groundwater in the Deschutes River basin, said Huntley’s explanation is unlikely.

Only in very rare instances does groundwater flow in channels like Huntley describes, he said.

In most places, particularly here in Central Oregon, the underground aquifer is what scientists call a “permeable matrix of rock.” In other words, it more closely resembles a bathtub filled with gravel — water fills the tiny nooks amid the rock. It’s everywhere, so it doesn’t make sense that a water witch would detect distinct channels of water.

“The water table is the top of that zone of saturation. And underneath that, the pore spaces between the grains of sand and gravel are filled with water. That’s where a well gets its water,” Morgan said.

Still, some people say they can’t help but believe in dowsing.

Take, for example, David Newton — an engineer who owns Newton Consultants in Redmond. His father founded Newton Pump Co., also in Redmond, 50 years ago. Newton grew up helping his father fix water pumps and broken pipes and the like.

“One time we were out at Tumalo, and we had a pump problem. So three of us were trying to find a buried steel water pipe. We were … just pot-holing around there and not having any luck. So Dad goes over to the pickup and he has these two rods. He held them about 6 inches apart, parallel, one in each hand, and he’s walking back and forth,” Newton said.

Suddenly, the rods crossed each other. Newton’s father stopped walking and instructed the two to start digging. Sure enough, they uncovered the pipe.

“I honestly think there’s something to it,” Newton said of witching.

Ken White, a Terrebonne resident, thinks so, too. He worked construction in the 1970s with a partner who witched for buried gas and water lines.

“He used two welding rods, and he was 100 percent (right) all the time,” White said. “We were working in really small towns, mostly with government contracts, and there was lots of existing stuff in the ground that wasn’t really documented all that well. We didn’t have maps, we had him and his rods. And I don’t think he’d ever hit anything. So I guess some people do have it.”

Articles about dowsing appeared this summer in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Dowsers hope this is a sign of renewed interest in the practice.

Huntley, for one, hopes his business picks up.

“I’d like to do more,” he said. “I’d like to do a lot more.”