In a world where we seem to be losing our connection to the elements, the divining rod hints at more than underground aquifers. It is the evidence of things not seen, perhaps even the substance of things hoped for.
Words by Kimberly Coburn | Illustration by Georgia Perry
January 8, 2025
Joe Chastain knelt in the mottled sunlight beneath a beech tree. He braced the small, forked branch he had finally selected against his Wranglers with one hand and worked the blade of his knife against it with the other.
A low hum of cicadas rattled the air.
“You’ve got to be sure to get the little knots off,” he said. “They’ll tear up your hands.”
He stood and walked a few steps toward the path. In his early 40s, he had the broad-shouldered bearing of a man who earns his living outdoors. He opened his palms skyward like someone feeling for rain.
“You hold it just like this.” He wrapped his hands around the short ends of the Y-shaped branch. Elbows at his sides, fists close to his chest, he pulled his hands apart until the tension tilted the stick toward the canopy. His knuckles whitened. “I put a pretty good bit of pressure on it.”
Despite his sturdy work boots, Joe’s even strides along the mountain trail hardly made a sound. He had taken about 15 steps when it happened: The branch yanked toward the ground as if pulled by an invisible cord.
He looked at me and shrugged. His beard did little to obscure a small, gratified grin. He was proud: not the “ta-da” bravado of an illusionist who has wowed his audience, but a quiet, humble satisfaction. Unlike the jaded performer executing the rote machinery of a trick, Joe believed in the magic. He had inherited it. He held it in his hands. And it had not failed him.
The earth spoke, and he listened.
“This would be a fine place to put a well.”
Earlier that morning, as I drove north on Highway 441 out of Atlanta toward the Appalachian foothills of North Georgia, the radio signal began to fade. Somewhere between the bright graffiti of the School Bus Graveyard in Alto and the infamous speed trap in Tallulah Falls, it took on a steady, summer-sprinkler hiss. A twist of the tuner surfaced ghostly echoes of mariachi music, a garbled discussion on the price of insulin, a fevered but indecipherable sermon.
Another turn of the dial: the alien keening of something like a theremin warbled a tune I knew but couldn’t place. One more: It resolved into Roy Orbison’s plaintive tenor baying oooonly the lonely. The oldies station came through strong all the way to Mountain City, where a small brown sign pointed the way to the Foxfire Museum.
I turned off the highway and onto the flank of Black Rock Mountain, passing churches of three different denominations and a scattering of homes before pulling onto Foxfire Lane and out of linear time. With its warren of log cabins and empty blacksmith’s forge, hammer still resting on the anvil, Foxfire’s campus felt like an Appalachian outpost that had been enchanted, cursed, or raptured. In truth, it had been constructed by a bunch of teenagers in the 1970s.
Foxfire began as an experiential education project where high school students collected oral histories. They sought to preserve a record of the “old ways” at risk of dying out as modernity paved its way into mountain life. The stories became a magazine, the magazine became a 1972 best-selling book, the books became a series, and the royalties bought a piece of land on which to move old cabins from nearby counties and freeze time.
From predicting the harshness of winter by the layers of an onion or planting in accordance with the night sky, the traditions chronicled by Foxfire often reflected an intimate and animate understanding of place. It was the perfect spot to meet Joe. Not only had his family been involved with Foxfire from its first days, but Joe himself is a living steward of a fast-dying tradition: He is a dowser. With the aid of a pair of L-shaped copper wires or a forked branch, he will comb a mountainside to locate underground water. “I can’t tell you how deep it is, I can just tell you it’s there.” Joe’s blue eyes were wide. “People don’t believe in it, but it works.”
Joe’s parents met as teenagers at Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School. His father’s folks were sharecroppers who raised corn for the school; his mother’s family ran the school’s hog farm and helped with construction of the Foxfire Museum. His mother was among the first cohort of Foxfire students to begin recording the endangered stories and skills of generations prior; a picture of her holding a notebook and a microphone graces the cover of the 25th-anniversary Foxfire book. His father kept the old knowledge alive in a different way.
“My dad’s the one who did this,” Joe told me as we started walking Foxfire’s empty paths. “We used to do it a lot when I was younger. We’d call it witchin’.” Dowsing has gone by many names, from ones that sound holy (“divining”) to occult (“rhabdomancy”), vaguely medical (“radiesthesia”) to something like a bygone dance craze (“doodlebugging”). “Witching” in this case might refer to the use of witch hazel branches rather than a coven of water-finding crones. But like most things, when it comes to dowsing, the truth is hard to reckon. As folk abilities go, dowsing is one of the few that has primarily been associated with men. The skill is more common, the lore says, in a seventh son of a seventh son or a boy born on Christmas Day. Joe is neither. He simply discovered his ability as a kid and hasn’t looked back: “When we first went out, my dad said, ‘Now, you might not be able to do it and you might be able to.’ Well,” — he held back a rogue sapling so I could pass — “I could do it.”
There was a time when a dowser was as essential to a community as the wortcunner who knew the plants to poultice a wound. His stick pointed to a place where a man might spend months digging in the dank earth with just enough room to swing a pick or heave a shovel, hauling soil out and lowering rocks in day after day. Every foot would bring the digger deeper and closer to the potential dangers of collapse or bad air. I imagine him looking up at a dime of sky and praying for wet feet and slaked thirst. It was no small responsibility people placed in a water witcher’s sensitive hands.
“Every town or holler in the southern Appalachians would have a dowser within a short distance,” explained Lee Barnes, resident of Waynesville, North Carolina, and president of the Appalachian Chapter of the American Society of Dowsers. “We didn’t have drilling machines until probably the 1920s here, and if you’re going to dig a well by hand a hundred feet down, you don’t want to do it twice.”
Barnes, who holds a Ph.D. in environmental horticulture, was named Educator of the Year by the American Society of Dowsers in 2012. The society’s Latin motto — Indago Felix, or “the fruitful search” — has become something of a guidepost for his life. He has witched more than 500 wells, dowsing for not only their location but their depth and quality. He remains deeply committed to preserving the art by sharing it: “Right now, my biggest challenge is educating new people into dowsing. A lot of the elders I used to go to national conventions with are aging out. I just turned 70, and I can’t do what I used to do, but I need to teach the youth — and by youth I mean anyone from 4 to 45 — how to do this. Because if not, it’s lost.”
In a call, he told me about the focused state many dowsers drop into before surveying an area and shared EEG studies showing dowsers’ brainwave states while searching. The graphs show brainwave patterns similar to those of transcendental and Zen meditators. The key, Barnes told me, is clearing your mind and asking the right questions. Some witchers mumble to themselves, some pray — whatever it takes to get them into what Barnes refers to as “dowsing consciousness.”
Joe and I stepped into a clearing where he could demonstrate how dowsing works. He suggested we start with metal L-rods first, since they were often easier for people to use. Then, he suggested, we could try a forked branch. I watched closely as he held the thin copper rods parallel to one another in loose fists. I listened for murmured incantations but heard only the electric symphony of early summer insects, punctuated by the unmistakable yipping of a pileated woodpecker. I asked what steps he would take to prepare if he were looking for water in earnest instead of just showing me how it’s done.
He considered for a moment. “I just cut a stick and walk out there and do it. There’s nothing much more than that.” His tone was matter-of-fact, as if he were describing the act of breathing. “With these,” he said, nodding at the copper rods, “you just hold them up and walk.”
He hadn’t taken more than four or five long steps when the rods swung toward one another and crossed. “There must be a water line out here.” We both looked toward the nearest cabin about 20 yards away, and sure enough a hose bib sprouted from the building’s side exactly parallel to where Joe stood. He laughed. “There it is. I hadn’t seen that.”
We walked clear of any obvious water lines, and Joe handed me the rods. I raised my fists to elbow height and felt the wires lolling in my loose grasp. I did my best to keep them pointed forward, though they seemed to have a mind of their own. Once I got them settled at a neutral parallel, I looked at Joe. He smiled. “Just take off walking,” he said, waving ahead of me.
I felt a shiver of apprehension. At first, I attributed it to my annoying urge to be instantly adept at anything I touch, but it ran deeper than that. I wanted dowsing to work. I wanted proof that we can still be in conversation with the earth, that if we listen, it will whisper to us. Outside the Rip Van Winkle terrain of Foxfire churned a chaotic world. Had I twisted the tuner a bit further that morning, I would have heard news stories of blazing temperatures or the impending threat of the Gulf Stream collapse. I met with Joe because I was curious about an unusual tradition. But really, I thirsted for evidence that, despite all signs to the contrary, we’re not wholly estranged from this wounded world.
I stepped tentatively forward, struggling to keep my upper body stationary, as if I were walking with a stack of books on my head. I was so focused on keeping the rods even that it took me by surprise when they slowly swung shut like a gate caught in a breeze. It felt as ordinary and remarkable as a heartbeat.
“That’ll be fine,” Joe said. He dragged his heel on the ground to mark where the rods had crossed, and I handed them to him. He walked back down the trail, and then retraced my steps. The rods swiftly swept closed about 18 inches past his heel mark. “Close!” he nodded encouragingly. “Now let’s find a stick. That’s the real deal.”
Some dowsers claim Moses among their ranks for his ability to draw water from a stone with his staff. Others assert a 6000 B.C. Algerian cave painting depicts a man using a dowsing rod, though a closer examination shows what looks to be a crossed bow and arrow. Given water’s primacy to our survival, there are countless vernacular traditions of finding it. But using a forked stick or rods to locate the unseen is a relatively modern technique first detailed in Georgius Agricola’s 16th-century De Re Metallica.
The German book became the foundational text for mining and metallurgy for 200 years. Despite the technique’s receiving only a fleeting mention in a section on finding veins of ore, dowsing was quickly adopted by English tin miners and embraced by the French for finding metal, murderers, underground springs, and Protestants. Along with disease and displacement, these colonial powers brought dowsing to the New World; the need to find clean, reliable water in a new and mercurial terrain cemented its place in American traditional folkways.
Skepticism of dowsing is as old as the practice. Agricola himself suggested “therefore a miner … should not make use of an enchanted twig … a forked stick is of no use to him.” In 1917, the Department of the Interior and the United States Geological Survey published the pamphlet “The Divining Rod: A History of Water Witching” to debunk dowsing. Forty years later, a Harvard anthropology survey of agricultural extension agents revealed that over half considered the practice nothing more than a pervasive superstition. Since then, the gap between the believers and the skeptics has only grown. For years, famous magician and skeptic James Randi offered a million dollars to anyone who could conclusively prove that dowsing worked; no one won the prize. Despite the American Society of Dowsers conducting research or amplifying international studies demonstrating the validity of the practice, the experiments have not been replicated, and the groundwater science community has dismissed dowsing outright.
Many dissenters attribute the rod’s motion to the ideomotor response, the same phenomenon that moves a Ouija planchette. Subtle, subconscious movements of the dowser’s hands in response to the environment cause the rods or stick to move. Despite this explanation being used dismissively, it means that — far from being charlatans — dowsers may have such a bone-deep understanding of the landscape that they can sense the most likely place for water precognitively. In an era when most Americans can’t name the phase of the moon or our nearest watershed, such an embodied awareness of place is significant.
Now that humanity is knocking on the door of fusion power and quantum computing, you might think science would offer a fail-proof way to locate underground water. Though big-budget projects can utilize satellites and ground-penetrating radar for a clearer view, they’re still not without their limitations. For most hydrologists, siting a well is a calculated guess informed by an understanding of geology, topography, vegetation, and the presence and productivity of nearby wells. Some mysteries refuse to acquiesce to our charts and spreadsheets; the primary way to find water underground remains the same as it has always been: You’ve gotta dig.
Joe and I returned to the paths in search of a forked branch. A good stick, it turned out, was much harder to find than water. Joe scanned the trees looking for the right shape and diameter. “All the old-timers, they liked to use peach tree limbs. They were pretty flexible and wouldn’t break. For me, I don’t really care what kind.”
The trail turned, revealing a small chapel perched on a hill. It looked empty, but strange singing poured out of it: something between a heavenly host and cats in a bag. I wondered if it was another Foxfire enchantment until I told Joe I’d be right back and made my way to the door. Motion-sensor lights flicked on, illuminating a small room the museum had dressed to look as if a service might take place any minute. A looped recording of shape note singing warbled “… yes, every secret of my heart shall surely be made known.”
Archival photographs on the wall offered snapshots of rural religious life: a revival preacher pointing toward heaven, the long table of a church potluck bending under the weight of a waiting feast. In one image, a man in Sunday clothes stands waist deep in a river. He has a towel around his neck and his hands beneath the shoulders of another man whose arms are crossed and whose face is obscured by the current. A quote above it read: “We were all baptized out there in the creek.” In these Southern waterways, the visceral thirst for water becomes a spiritual one: salvation in the springs, redemption in the river. God as living water.
I wasn’t raised with much religion, but in that moment my heart was flooded with compassion for our trembling vulnerability, for our opaque awareness of where to find comfort. We live in a culture so stripped of its animacy, we mistake the earth’s enigmatic language for silence; we turn to find it mute in the face of our worry and need. We put ourselves, instead, in the business of assurances. Whether through the plunge of baptism or the rigor of the scientific method, we feel our way in the dark toward certainty.
I found Joe not far from where I had left him, still hunting for the perfect forked stick. I joked that we should dowse for a dowsing rod and asked him if he’d ever used his ability to find anything other than water, like lost objects. “Nope,” he replied. “Never tried to do that. I just stick to water, and I leave it at that.” Joe told me he considered it an ability you’ve got or you don’t, kind of like perfect pitch or photographic memory.
“When we go witchin’, we don’t charge. It’s free,” he added. He made his living not from dowsing but from building fences, though he often used his skills on the job to find forgotten water lines before digging. “As far as I understand it — and I may be totally wrong — it’s a gift and you present it for free. I do know that a lot of the older people that did it said that if you do charge, you could lose it. So, I don’t know, but we’ve always done it for free.”
When I spoke with Lee Barnes, he told me he believes dowsing to be an innate ability and claimed that of the thousands of people he’s trained, only a handful had no success at all. He theorizes that they were too afraid or closed to the idea for it to work. He admitted, though, that some people seem to have a particular knack for it, getting numbers similar to his after practicing for only a few hours.
It might also be a matter of the landscape. In areas with unconfined aquifers, if you dig deep enough, you’ll eventually hit water — a fact many scientists note when dismissing the practice of dowsing. But in the crystalline bedrock of the Blue Ridge aquifer, water moves in cracks and fissures within the rock, making drilling for water a more precise affair and locating it a rarified skill.
Even the most blinkered skeptic would be hard-pressed to deny that we live in a world full of casual miracles: the common swift can remain aloft for 10 months without landing; the peculiar and precious axolotl can regenerate not only limbs but jaws, heart, spinal cord, all without so much as a scar; the wood frog survives winter by freezing completely — no respiration, no heartbeat — for up to seven months before thawing out and hopping off in the course of a single warm day.
We might be a bit rusty, but humans have some impressive faculties, too. Conjure up the petrichor perfume of rain after a dry spell or the musk of freshly tilled earth. That alluring funk is geosmin, a byproduct of soil bacteria; the human nose can sense geosmin at concentrations as low as 5 parts per trillion (think half a teaspoon in 200 Olympic-size swimming pools). Adapted to the dark, the human eye can detect a single photon. We can smell a drop of rain and see the smallest possible particle of electromagnetic energy. Each of us carries a silent library grown by every ancestor who survived fire, flood, and famine.
Despite having outsourced the ability to orient our place in space to a friendly voice in our phones, we might still feel the world’s insistent tug; a 2019 study at the California Institute of Technology challenged the long-held belief that humans cannot sense the Earth’s magnetic field: “We have found proof that humans possess a definitive sixth sense — magnetism,” said project leader Professor Joseph Kirschvink. “It could explain why some people have better senses of direction than others, for example. It might even be possible one day to restore our ancestral ability to use magnetic fields to navigate.”
This sensitivity to magnetism could explain the dip of a dowser’s rod. It’s not a matter of the wooden rod suddenly becoming magnetically charged, but rather that a sensitive dowser’s body responds over areas of shifting magnetic gradients. Lee Barnes thinks so. “I’m a trained scientist,” he told me, “and I believe that I’m detecting weak electromagnetic fields above the fractures in the bedrock.”
Joe let out a small whoop. He pulled his knife from the weathered leather sheath on his belt and began trimming off a perfectly forked branch. I asked what kind of tree it was. “Beech,” he replied. “I will say, when you’re looking for water, you have to look at what trees are here. Poplars are a good sign.” He trimmed the ends of the branches. “I actually have a forestry degree.” He chuckled. “I don’t use it much, but I have one.”
The cicadas droned. Joe worked those knots from the branch, warning me how they could tear my hands. When he pointed the forked wood toward the sky, it looked as if he were tuning into some kind of arboreal ham radio, confident a signal would emerge from the silence. After only a few steps, the branch had wrenched unmistakably toward the earth. Then the small shrug. The proud smile.
In the year of our Lord 2024, I was standing in the Georgia woods, watching a man trace the hidden terrain of the underworld with a stick. Just beyond the safe, well-lit room of certainty tumble the vast, velvet wilds of possibility; they are home to our most fantastic notions of the universe and our place in it. They’re the realms of the genius and the madman; they’re the places from which the theories that underpin existence, the ones dismissed as lunacy at best and heresy at worst, are born. Indago Felix.
“It is a universal condition of the enjoyable that the mind must believe in the existence of a law, and yet have a mystery to move about in,” mused 19th-century Scottish physicist and poet James Clerk Maxwell. His name is not well known outside of science circles, but we live in a world defined by his wild calculus. From the fertile darkness, Maxwell heard the universe humming. He theorized the invisible fabric of radio waves decades before the first broadcast, before we sent messages across oceans and ballads into the secret recesses of the human heart. He threw a rock down the well of mystery but didn’t live long enough to hear its watery echo.
Now, we are wreathed not only in his theorized electromagnetic waves but also in the sound they carry. Every radio transmission ever sent — Fessenden’s ghostly “O, Holy Night” violin solo on Christmas Eve of 1906; Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love” that bounced through the speakers as Foxfire teens moved whole cabins log by numbered log; Orbison’s “Only the Lonely,” first in 1960 and over again until its latest reprise on my morning drive — radiates forever out into space: an infinite, time-traveling serenade sailing through the darkness at the speed of light.
In 1946, Albert Einstein, Maxwell’s intellectual successor, exchanged letters with a man whose late father had spent his career exploring dowsing. He wrote: “I know very well that many scientists consider dowsing as they do astrology, as a type of ancient superstition. According to my conviction, this is, however, unjustified. The dowsing rod is a simple instrument which shows the reaction of the human nervous system to certain factors which are unknown to us at this time.”
Joe handed me the beech branch. I held it like he showed me, pulling my hands apart until the stick gestured toward the sky and my nails dug into my palms. The worry was gone. I concentrated on my hands, trying to feel some kind of tingling energy. The stick felt like a stick. I walked over the spot that had reached out and grabbed the branch for Joe. Not even a wiggle. The underground remained a riddle I was not meant to solve. “Yeah.” Joe nodded. “Lots of people can do copper wires, but the stick is a special gift.” And then, encouragingly, to soothe my pride: “But everybody’s got something!”
Maybe Joe’s muscles responded to his seeing poplars in his periphery, to feeling a dip in the ground, in a way mine wouldn’t. Maybe two decades of relying on GPS had dulled me to the Earth’s subtle nudges. Maybe there was no water — or water is everywhere — and dowsing is little more than a stubborn superstition after all.
I didn’t care; I was no longer interested in proof small enough to hold in my hands. The world never stopped speaking to us; even the radio’s static contains within it a murmur of radiation from the Big Bang. By letting go of certainty, we made room for the unknown, for the resonant mystery. And when we learned how to reply, we called back in song.
I asked Joe about the mechanics behind dowsing. “I think it’s got a lot to do with gravity, but I really can’t explain how it works.” He fixed me with his fathomless blue eyes. “A lot of things don’t have to be explained.” ◊
