L-Rods and a Search for a Sewer

With Tom Graves’s advice in mind – get right down to dowsing instead of studying it for months on end – today I scanned a couple of my dowsing books about the tools. I read about Y-rods, L-rods and the pendulum, and quickly decided to go with the L-rod for three reasons:

• First, I figure I can make a set of them quickly and inexpensively. The books suggest cutting up a common coat-hanger. I’ll need something to serve as sleeves, something that’ll allow the rods themselves to swing freely. I’ll need to go to the store.

• Second, the pendulum seems more complicated because it’s the choice of dowsers working in the more esoteric, spiritual and intuition-intensive areas. I figure the pendulum is a tool I can graduate to if I can develop some level of proficiency with the simpler L-rods. 

• And third, the only time I’ve actually witnessed dowsing, the fellow used L-rods. Here’s that story:

In 2003, my wife and I moved to southern Ohio for a sabbatical while I worked on a book. We bought a charming 1833 Federal cottage in the small (less than 800 people) village of Lynchburg in Highland County, maybe forty miles north of the Ohio River and Kentucky. The village was demographically on the northern edge of Appalachia. The area was rural and poor. People got by however they could, as they always have.

Behind the house were the concrete remains of an old septic tank, sticking a foot above the ground and, in the warm months, providing a perfect place for young snakes to sun themselves. A plumber I met also ran a little excavation business and offered to bring over his back-hoe, smash down the concrete walls of the septic and bury them in the underground hole where the tank had been. The problem was, we could see where the sewer pipe left the house and ran toward the old septic tank, and we knew the sewer line was now connected to the village sewer line at the back end of my property. But we didn’t know if my house’s sewer line ran through the old septic tank itself. If it did, and if we smashed down the tank’s concrete walls, we would smash the sewer line and I’d have a problem – a very messy and expensive one.

I called the village water department and three men showed up. (They also were the village street department, the parks department, etcetera.) The problem, one of them told me, was that a fire in the village offices a few years back had burned all the maps showing where the underground utilities ran.

“You mean we have to dig up the whole yard to find out where the line goes?” I wondered.

One of the men, a small fellow whose name I recall as Denny, walked back to the village dump truck and returned with two L-rods. I saw him and thought to myself: “You’ve got to be kidding.”

Denny paced back and forth behind the house holding the two L-rods in front of him and every time he crossed where we knew the sewer line to be, his rods crossed. They kept crossing and uncrossing as he walked alongside the sunken concrete wall and still kept crossing and uncrosssing as he paced back and forth toward the village main sewer on the rear property line.

“Your sewer line goes around the old septic,” Denny eventually announced. “Not through it. You can bury this stuff, no problem.”

Completely intrigued, I talked with Denny for a few minutes about dowsing. He didn’t say much about it, other than he saw nothing unusual in his ability – something shared by a lot of people in these parts, he told me.

Obviously, this one real-life example of dowsing made an impression on me. I thought again of Denny – pacing the yard on that hot Ohio day, his wire rods swinging over the underground sewer line – as I headed off to Home Depot in search of parts for my L-rods.