Junction, Texas has a very hot and arid climate. While it has the Llano River and some summer rains, the main source of water in this region is obscured. Buried between 300-700 feet below the surface is the hill country’s life force: the Edwards Aquifer. It is fed by underground springs and has the clean, clear water that is essential for life. It sustains over 60 endemic plant and animal species, not including humans. Living in this area most often requires drilling a well into one of the thousands of narrow underground rivers that make up this aquifer. If your drill misses, you have to dig even deeper through blue clay and trinity sand, where you’ll find gyp water, which is sulphuric and contains iron ore. Gyp water requires huge amounts of filtering once it’s brought to the surface and can be a disaster for someone without the means to dig another well. It’ll ruin your sink. To deal with this issue people in this part of Texas have been using the centuries old practice of dowsing. 

Robert Bierschwale has been dowsing, or witching, in central Texas for over 30 years. He is one of a few remaining people in the area keeping the practice alive. Witching is the act of holding two rods, sometimes called divining rods, parallel to the ground in front of you and watching the movement of the rods to determine what’s going on below the surface. If the rods cross then you’re standing above water, if they stay straight the earth below you is solid. 

Robert started witching out of necessity. As a younger man, he would take any job that came along to him, and ended up on a crew looking for buried water and electrical lines. Robert had a knack for it and was able to get work on his own finding places for people to drill their wells. He is self taught but knew all about the practice of witching from the generation before him and men like Harlan Hyatt, who had been witching in the area for many years before Robert was born. This work sustained Robert for over a decade. “It’s almost scary how many water wells we dug…over 100 wells in seven years, all around Edwards, Sutton, and Kimble Counties.”

How witching actually works is more of a mystery, but Robert doesn’t worry so much about that. “I really don’t know [how witching works]…I think it’s something about the static electricity.” Robert uses brass rods to do his witching because that’s the material that works the best for him, but other materials are common. Robert’s father was able to get peach tree branches to move, but Robert’s brass rods would sit still for him, and the same for Robert with his father’s peach tree branches. “But if he put his hand on my shoulder it’d get them moving, and same for me if I put my hand on his shoulder.” Witching has thus far not been found to have any scientific basis by any legitimate scientific bodies, but the unexplained magic of witching has not diminished its widespread use. From California to Maine, water witching is still practiced regularly. 

The use of a divining rod, or witching, is a centuries old practice that’s recorded use dates back to the 16th century. Believed to be an occult practice, or even guidance by the hands of the devil, it was banned in the early years of the Catholic Church. But witching is still regularly used by a variety of people for finding a number of hidden things. There is still a worldwide community of witchers, but Robert never really got into it. To him it was “just one more thing to worry about.” And the larger community doesn’t have the same focus that Robert and other witchers in central Texas do. They focus more on the spiritual aspects of it, and some people even claim that they can draw the sickness out of people, which Robert found a little too far-fetched.

Robert believes that, with the right practice, anyone can find water. “It’s like baseball, you can’t say you can’t do it if you haven’t thrown a pitch,” but he will also admit that there are some people that just can’t do it. “You have to walk fast,” he says, “you could see if I walk real slow the rods will just go all over the place” He has mostly gotten out of the water business but he still gets a few calls a year for witching work. And while new technologies for finding buried water and infrastructure are available, like ground penetrating radar and electronic water pulse generators, in Junction, Texas, Robert Bierschwale is just a phone call away.