Doodlebugged
Since ancient times, man has needed water and yet has for some reason chosen to live where there was none in apparent evidence. I suppose there are lots of good reasons why that might come to pass, but it seems that given the fairly scant number of humans walking the Earth in olden days (supposedly only 5 million souls in 10,000 B.C., when agriculture was invented and more water was needed for that purpose), man would have made a point of finding arable land nearer a convenient and obvious source of fresh water. But that was not the case, and more often than not, the knucklehead who said, “let’s plant crops here!” only then scratched his head and said, “what are we gonna do about water, since I think growing crops requires water?” Hence, the creation of what I choose to call the Mr. Haney effect (for those of you who fondly remember Green Acres like I do). Mr. Haney is the guy who is always tying together two slicks and trying to sell it to you as some sort of valuable tool that you cannot live without. In the case of water, or the lack thereof, he’s the guy who takes one stick and twiddles it around this way and that way to try to convince you that he can use it to find water.
This age old art form is called dowsing or water divining and it is a very old and broadly accepted way for some charlatan to separate you from a few bucks by saying that he can fix your water problem with nothing more than a willow or witch hazel stick formed into a Y and held palms up with the twitchiness of a Quija Board until it points the shaft of the Y downward towards the earth and indicates the existence of hidden groundwater and THE place where you should drill your well. The fact that groundwater exists in the ground underneath almost every non-arid spot of land on earth and that no dowser ever said exactly how far down you had to drill to get water, makes it more than likely that you will be pleased as the dowser’s client, since who will know any better whether this spot or another would have produced different results? The complete lack of any scientific evidence to back up the art of water dowsing, or what gets called doodlebugging in many rural areas of America, has continued to make this a viable profession to this day.
It has always amazed me that a thinking person, and especially a highly pragmatic person, which is how I would generally characterize people like farmers, would find anything worthwhile about a person walking around with a stick that magically tells him where some force of nature tells him where water can be found. It is one thing to be a person of faith, there are many reasons why that might be an understandable way of thinking and believing. It is even only mildly questionable for a person to be superstitious since it usually boils down to where’s the harm in that. But to watch a person like Mr. Haney walk around and pretend to know where water can be found and who is prepared to keep a straight face while he pretends that some other-worldly force is moving his dowsing stick earthward, is hard to get past. Charging for and thus paying for such a service tips the scales for me and turns this from a silly activity to fraud.
I live in California, a state with Riparian Rights, a common law concept that goes back to England, which means that a landowner who owns land adjacent to a body of water, has a right to reasonable use of that water. But the laws governing surface water are quite different from the laws governing groundwater. Property owners can “own” water to which they are adjacent, but only the state (or sometimes the Federal government) owns water that is below the ground. That does not mean that you cannot dig down and tap into the aquifer for water if you want, quite the opposite. The state ownership of groundwater is not intended to prevent anyone from not achieving what is called “absolute ownership” over water they can access under their land. Land owners are not allowed to complain about the activities of other land owners who are within the same common water basin, so long as they are not engaged in what is called “malicious use.” What does all of this mean and why do I care?
California has been a big drought state for a long time. The history of drought in California goes back to 1841, 1864, 1924, 1928–1935, 1947–1950, 1959–1960, 1976–1977, 1986–1992, 2006–2010, 2011–2017, and 2020–2022. Strangely enough, the movie that most of us remember that centered around water rights in California was Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, and that took place in 1937, in the middle of a nice long non-drought period. Consider that a foreshadowing for this story. I have owned this hilltop since early 2012, so for the eleven years before this year, fully nine of the eleven years we have been in drought as a state. In the most recent drought period, when I was living out here on this hilltop full-time, the state drought map was far worse to the north than it was down here in San Diego County. We really haven’t been under extreme drought conditions and water restrictions, and yet we were keeping our heads down since it seemed like any day we could have been forced to knuckle under restrictions like turning off landscape irrigation. And now this year, after thirteen or more atmospheric rivers visiting our fair state from the Pacific Ocean (our less drought-prone southern county being less impacted, but still pretty soggy at this point), drought concerns have tremendously receded. I just heard that Mammoth Mountain, the iconic ski area located on a lava dome in the Sierra Nevada range, has reached a snowpack of 695 inches (the prior record being 668 inches) and thus, we can reasonably predict that the California drought has come to an end…at least for now.
They say that when God closes a door, he opens a window. But what happens when God opens a door? The door I have in mind is the one to the San Diego water closet, specifically the water on my own hillside. During the worst of the rain showers last week, I noticed that when the rain stopped and the driveway started to dry, the lower part of the driveway was flowing like a river into the street. At first, I thought the hillside was just leaking out its excess water like squeezing a sponge. But then I remembered that the Valley Center Water Authority had sent me yet another excess water use alert. In fact, the recent alert was more dramatic than others I had gotten weekly over the past few months. This one suggested that I was hemorrhaging 600 gallons per hour for 28 consecutive hours. And here’s the thing, it went on and off like a light switch.
I had already had a plumber tighten the house plumbing and had my irrigation guy promise me that there were no leaks in that 24-zone timer-driven system. After scouring the detailed hour-by-hour water usage records from the Water Authority, it became clear that the culprit was the spa, which cycled its filter every day at the hours that were the prolific water leakage times. I then narrowed it down further by filling the spa and the water feature (a small waterfall that feeds an overflow trench around the spa) to see what happened to that over a few days. What I’ve learned from that is that the spa holds water perfectly, but the water feature has a small leak, but nothing even close to 600 gallons per hour, more like 5 gallons per hour at most. That meant that the leak was from a forced pumping of the water feature refill valve, which must have been purging water down through the front garden to the lower driveway, where the river I noticed had been flowing.
I have not yet resolved the source of the leak, but I have it under control now, and it’s just a matter of time. Now I’m just waiting for a visit from Mr. Haney and his doodlebug stick to confirm everything for me.