Call me a skeptic

I have this brother-in-law, let’s call him “Lane” who has helped Jill and me with all sorts of menial labor type tasks over the years. He’s helped us move at least 3 times without complaint. So when he moved into a new house a while back, it was unfortunate that it was at a time that I was unable to help, due to not wanting to. He also built a rock wall one time and was looking for help, but alas, I had to go for a bike ride or something.

I’ve always felt kind of guilty about the uneven favor balance, so when I heard he was going to move his backyard fence to the north about 23 feet (7 meters), I vigorously volunteered to help. Mainly, to alleviate the guilt. But it also seemed like it could be some good exercise.

The first thing we had to do is wait for the guy with the auger, we’ll call him “Mike” to show up. In case you don’t know, an auger is used to dig cylindrical holes for posts for fences, not to be confused with a bung hole borer or reamer.

Once Mike got there, we had the labor-intensive duty of standing around watching him use his 2-man auger by himself. Any of us would have helped, but he didn’t want it. There was one guy, who shall henceforth be known as “Steve” in this story, who sheepishly tried to help Mike by lightly pressing down on one of the handles with a couple of his fingers while Mike drilled into the ground.

I should back up a minute. It should be noted at this time that there were about 5 guys at the fence moving party. We think of ourselves as reasonably smart people. We think we’ve got what it takes intellectually to put some holes in the ground. As it turns out, intellect can be your enemy when it comes to trades such as digging. See, Lane has an underground sprinkler system which complicates the matter slightly. We don’t want to dig just anywhere potentially rupturing a water line so we had to be careful about where we put these holes. Luckily for us, the problem has a simple solution if you believe in magic.

Turns out Mike is a “dowser”. He can divine the location of water under his feet by using bent pieces of wire and walking around until they move. I did not realize what he was doing until it was explained to me. The thinking here is that the sprinkler lines under the ground will have water in them. This highly abnormal concentration (about 1 inch diameter) of water about 8 inches below ground will trigger these handheld bent wires to move together.
“We’ve got a skeptic!” Lane shouted after it was explained to me.
“I’m no skeptic,” I insisted. “That would mean that I doubt it. I don’t doubt it. I know it’s bullshit.”
“Skeptic,” the other four nodded in knowing agreement. It was like they were saying, “How cute. The computer guy doesn’t believe in the science of divining rods.”

“Well ok guys, How’s it work, then?”

Mike was happy to explain:

Here’s the interesting stuff I learned about dowsing.
Only Certain people, let’s call them “seers” can do it. Others cannot. Some are better (more sensitive, Mike explained) than others. Mike thinks it has something to do with the chemistry of the individual somehow mixing with the elements of the earth.

Power lines above can disrupt the reading. He showed us this by walking under power lines and – sure enough, the wires moved together like the closing of a gate, only to open as he cleared the source of interference. I thought of it much like the way you might tune a radio station in (except that there really are radios that can receive broadcasts).
It was really quite amazing. Not the dowsing. The fact that Mike, Steve and to a certain degree Lane all believed that the dowsing practice was smaller than some of the huge piles of shit they’d seen in the past. Fascinating.