‘Water witches’ deny their craft is mystical
Some ‘water witches’ deny there’s anything mystical about their craft
Armed with rods to detect minerals and water, dowsers say they feel connection to the earth.
Gary Plapp isn’t all wet when he says he can find water — or at least seek it — almost anywhere.
All he needs is a pair of metal rods. After all, he’s preparing for trips to locales as different as Grants and Hawaii to dowse, the practice of searching for minerals or water with a rod. It’s something he’s done for nearly a halfcentury in places near and far.
“I actually started dowsing when I was 14,” the Los Lunas man said. “I had a friend who had a game called Swami Knows All, which was a board game with a piece of nylon string and a lead weight on it. You’d ask the swami questions and I was getting great answers.”
Plapp doesn’t think of himself as a swami, but he’s not afraid to employ a pendulum, which for him, is a kind of early detection system for finding water.
“Before I go out on the land, I usually get a map, a layout of the property, and I dowse the map. It saves a lot of walking,” he said. “I’ve dowsed west of here near Ramah for cattle ranchers that have 1-mile-square sections. That’s a lot of walking. I use a map to see what’s what before I even go out there.”
If Plapp, who’s 76, retired and living on Social Security, finds something worthwhile using the pendulum, he heads out to locate the optimum drilling spot on the land. He typically employs a pair of metal L-rods, one held loosely in each hand. He says they tend to cross when he arrives at the spot where water can be found.
“I usually feel a pressure. Underground water produces an electrical charge that you can feel on the surface,” Plapp said, adding a
good water diviner doesn’t even need rods or a forked stick.
“You can just simply use your body, since your body’s like a natural antenna,” he said.
A dowser, also known in the vernacular as a “water witch,” can make some serious money. Some dowsers charge $100 per hour plus expenses, which can amount to a substantial bill when travel is involved. Plapp, who said there may be 15 or so dowsers in the state, sticks to water: He’s not interested when people call him looking for help to find lost pets, how to win the lottery or discover lost car keys.
“My primary focus has been to help people make the right decision as to where to drill and be in harmony with the land,” he said.
When he finds an auspicious spot, he usually can tell how deep the water is, how many gallons per minute a well will produce, and whether the water is potable and palatable.
“On Belen Mesa out here,” Plapp said, referring to a spot in Valencia County, “I’ve dowsed water for different properties and sometimes it’s very alkaline and not usable, so that’s important.”
Plapp said that many people don’t believe in dowsing and will leave everything up to the licensed drilling-rig operator. However, some drillers have their own dowsers or are dowsers themselves.
Plapp’s kind of focus is echoed by Aline Fourier, who lives near Santa Fe. She is primarily an artist but does some dowsing from time to time. Her first experience came in the early 1990s, when she and her husband found a home on a salt-marsh island in Maine.
She invited a driller to visit the site, and while they were talking he pulled down a Y-shaped branch from a tree. Fourier sensed a water-rich location, and both she and the driller walked around holding the branch and felt it dip down at that site.
Then she thought they could have been influencing the process with their minds. So she handed the branch to a friend’s 6-year-old daughter, who didn’t know anything about the dowsing procedure, and the branch moved.
They subsequently drilled at the point indicated and found fresh water at 83 feet.
“I can assess how strong the feeling is, based on the closeness to the surface,” Fourier said. “I don’t think it’s mystical.”
Neither does hydrologist Lee Wilson, who said experience and knowledge about the geology of an area might be a dowser’s best friend.
“If you’re a dowser and you have some knowledge of geology and you go to an area like Cerrillos that doesn’t have great conditions … you are looking for fractures in the rocks, and you might be able to find some water,” said Wilson, who has a firm in Santa Fe.
Wilson said he has never seen dowsing succeed in an area where the geology wasn’t already known, but allows that dowsers may “learn to know what to look for.
“There are physical techniques for sensing, and I suppose you could argue that these guys have some sort of electromagnetic energy field in their brains that equates to an electrical instrument,” he said.
But he also is skeptical about anything magical about a dowser’s rod, recalling an amateur dowser once told him that water diviners “put on a great show.”
Still, there are believers.
“Like aspirin, dowsing works whether you believe in it or not,” wrote historian Marc Simmons in The New Mexican in 2013.
Either way, water diviners talk about spiritual aspects to the work. In a story in the Taos News in October, homebuilder Joaquin Karcher talked about dowser Joe Graves, who had recently died.
“He’d come with his fresh-cut willow sticks under his arm, look at the land, take my hand and say a little prayer,” Karcher said. “He’d do his own little blessing to hope for good water and good health, then he’d get to work and find the spot.”
Another New Mexico dowser, Elliot Topper, who has 43 years of experience, said, “I do have a spiritual connection with dowsing. It’s meditation in motion.”
Topper, who lives on Nogal Mesa, southeast of Carrizozo, prefers using a forked branch of boxelder or apple. “I learned years ago to soak the sticks in rain and snow water; that keeps the sticks vibrant,” the 70-year-old said.
Topper explained his conception of water sources. “In the mountains of New Mexico, there’s water running through the rock. The geologists call them fractures; I call them veins,” he said. “I walk and map those out, and what I look for is what I call an intersection, the point where the veins crisscross. That will give us the best quantity and quality and best recharge.
“For many years now I have been dowsing on ranches as well as residential. People and a lot of children ask me how I do it. I can’t see the underground water, but I feel it. What it comes down to is energy work. I am a follower of the energy.”