Which Way to Water? In the West, Some Ask Witches : Rural life: Using sticks and fixed gazes, they find the best places for wells. Their success is unexplained.

MESQUITE, Nev. —  The Virgin River here has never been good for drinking, and another of the town’s wells recently dried up. It was time for Ken Jensen to work one of his miracles for local water officials.

A former president of the Mesquite water board, the third-generation Nevadan has made a custom of wetting thirsts in this desert outpost 75 miles north of Las Vegas. But the plain-speaking retired football coach doesn’t carry the usual credentials.

Jensen is not a soil engineer, a well driller or even an amateur geologist. He is a self-described water witch, a master of the mysterious practice of finding underground pools with nothing but a forked branch and a fixed gaze.

“We are a little old-fashioned out here, I guess,” Jensen, 50, said as he climbed a dusty hillock on the outskirts of town, a Y-shaped pomegranate shoot leading the way. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And this ain’t broke.”

Jensen belongs to a small but thriving coven of water witches working the arid West in the tradition of frontier diviners who tapped parched soils for homesteaders a century and a half ago. The power and accuracy of witching, as mystical and inexplicable as it may be, is sworn to by a growing number of farmers and ranchers from Utah to California to the Pacific Northwest.

In these tough economic times, rural landowners are searching for assurances--even uncertain, supernatural ones--that they have the right patch of earth before sinking expensive wells. Even some skeptics have summoned witches after more conventional water-seeking methods failed.

“We had drilled 420 feet for one guy and found no water,” said Mel Gardener, a well driller in Newcastle, Utah. “We were about to give up. So we got a (witch), and he said go to 460. There was water. He darn did make believers out of us.”

The flow of retirees from California and big cities across the West has helped stoke the witching wildfire. One popular witch in a remote corner of Utah has traveled up to 300 miles a day to locate water for newly transplanted urbanites. Witches charge from $100 to $500 to pinpoint well sites for retirement getaways on picturesque--but usually bone-dry--buttes and plains.

“Some people read their horoscope every day, some people watch the weatherman, and some people believe their fortune cookies,” said state engineer Mike Turnipseed, Nevada’s top water official. “A lot of people here have their wells witched. I am not sure I wouldn’t do the same.”

The witches are little known outside the rural towns and farms where they roam, and even then many are known by reputation only. They don’t advertise and most work other jobs, dabbling in witching only when the word-of-mouth network summons them.

When they venture into the city, witches are typically greeted with disbelief, sneers and cries of blasphemy, even though some say they trace their powers to Biblical times when Moses used a rod to tap water from a stone.

“I have seen it all my life, (but) I just don’t believe in it,” said Buster McKinney, who has run a prominent Las Vegas well drilling company since 1951. “Nobody here takes it seriously anymore.”

A two-hour drive deeper into the desert, Kendrick Hafen said he did not hesitate to consult a witch when wells in Mesquite, a predominantly Mormon town of 2,000, began drying up.

Hafen, who recently stepped down as general manager of the Mesquite water district, recalls that when he was a boy in Utah, a water witch located a well near his family’s cattle ranch, his first of many encounters with such wizardry. In 2 1/2 years at the Mesquite agency, Hafen called on Jensen four times to witch for water; not once did he consult a geologist or soil engineer.

Jensen, who runs a marketing business and volunteers his witching services, has overseen the sinking of seven wells in Mesquite, including one this year and an earlier gusher that is the town’s biggest.

“I guess from my professional background I questioned it to a certain extent, but I do believe there is merit to it,” said Hafen, an attorney who has worked in the water industry for 15 years. “I have seen it work. We found water in all of the wells. If I had drilled where he told me to drill and didn’t find water, then I wouldn’t have used him again.”

Still, the new general manager of the Mesquite water agency, a transplant from Salt Lake City, said that under his watch, the agency will consult Las Vegas drilling specialists about new wells.

“We will start using a geologist because I don’t know if I am a firm believer in that witching stuff,” said Mike Winters. “I think it is a rural kind of thing.”

Named for its seemingly magical origins, water witching was denounced as Satanic wizardry by religious authorities in the 1600s, but witches now mostly laugh at talk of devilish influences.

Most water witches--they also answer to witcher, dowser, diviner and doodlebugger--do not claim 100% accuracy, but they do insist that their methods are as reliable as those of more sophisticated--and costly--water consultants. Carson City water witch Harry Lawler, who has been working water magic for 25 years, said a good witch is on target about 90% of the time.

Gardener, the southern Utah driller, said good witches are enjoying a renaissance in areas where water is always tough to come by. Farmers and ranchers, he said, are seeking peace of mind before committing $40 per foot to drill wells, which can run as deep as 1,000 feet.

“It gives them a little extra insurance,” he said.

His ruddy face peeling in the hot sun, Gardener was sinking a 500-foot well near an alfalfa field one recent afternoon while two of his workers practiced witching with a willow branch and a pendulum. Gardener remains leery of the craft, but he admitted that witches have been as reliable as geologists during his 15 years in the drilling business.

“My only explanation is that things were put in the spirit world before we were born, that this information is in our minds if we just knew how to get it out,” said Gardener, who has seen countless witchings but has never successfully witched himself. “These witching tools are like antennas to your mind. Witchers can change what the tools do just by what they are thinking.”

As he spoke, Craig Whitney, who took up drilling and witching about two years ago, stood in the dusty wind with his eyes clamped shut and his muddy fingers wrapped around a willow branch. Witches use forked branches, pendulums, bent metal, coat hangers and even sophisticated manufactured divining rods--anything that responds to buried water, they say.

“I think of what I am looking for,” Whitney muttered toward an open field. “If you think of something else, you’ll just be standing here forever.”

After a long pause, Whitney’s forked shoot jerked toward the ground as he struggled to hold it fast. He opened his eyes. A good well could be sunk about 100 yards to the east, he proclaimed. His colleagues nodded in agreement.

Whitney admitted that he is new at witching, but he swears by the method. He even estimates the depth of wells, counting silently to himself in 10-foot intervals, waiting for his willow to drop at the first hint of water. As long as he concentrates, he says, he can be yards--even miles--away from the witching site.

Some witches dismiss such mental prognosticating as hocus-pocus. Eldon W. Schmutz, who said he has witched hundreds of wells over the past 40 years with only two misdiagnoses, insists that witching has more to do with physics than with metaphysics. Schmutz said the divining rod is drawn toward the ground when the magnetic field of submerged water crosses the “electric aura” of the witch.

“Everyone has an aura about them,” said Schmutz, a retired banker and former Cedar City, Utah, councilman who now witches and raises cattle in nearby New Harmony. “The ones with the stronger aura are the ones that water witching works for. If anybody talks about using their mind, I am skeptical about it. It is strictly a physical reaction.”

In the view of science, stories of successful witching have little basis in fact. An experiment at Utah State University in the 1970s found that divining rods may get a reaction when they pass through zones in Earth’s magnetic field, but the study was inconclusive. Most witches confess that the source of their powers is beyond explanation.

In the remote mining town of Searchlight, south of Las Vegas, gold prospector Van derGrift turned to a water witch after an engineer was unable to find water for his struggling gold operation. DerGrift said he wasn’t interested in an explanation of witching, just that Jean Henson, a retired Air Force intelligence officer turned witch, was able to strike it big.

Henson produced a well. He now prowls the grounds on weekends in search of buried gold, angled welding rods cocked in each hand like loaded six-shooters. So far it has been a difficult transition from water to gold witching, but Henson and many other witches claim that their powers extend beyond traditional water dowsing.

“If the gold was only as good as my water, I would be all right,” derGrift said hopefully.

In Northern California, driller Bruce Anderson said he advises skeptical customers to scrutinize the results of witching, not the methodology. Vice president of Weeks Drilling and Pump Co. in Sebastopol, Anderson has witched wells throughout Central and Northern California since 1970. He said his company relies on both traditional engineering and witching to locate drilling sites, a combination he claimed virtually guarantees success.

“I suffer a little ridicule once in a while, a little embarrassment, but it is well worth it,” Anderson said of his witching. “If I thought standing on my head for 10 minutes would make me successful in finding water, I would do that, too.”