Water Witches

by Chris Bohjalian

  I cannot imagine the woman's hair as anything but gray, just as I cannot envision most bald men with hair. And like Anna Avery twenty years ago, Governor Webster is a large woman: tall, assured, andas Roger Noonan wrote once in an editorial"of considerable presence."

  The American Society of Dowsers has been known to claim that Florence Webster is one of thema dowserbut she laughs the suggestion off and, essentially, denies it.

  "We have been told by the White House that the emergency money will be available to the State immediately," the Governor says to a reporter from the Burlington Free Press. "And we will, of course, follow up on that."

  "Has the National Weather Service given you any sense that there's rain on the way anytime soon?" Rosamond Donahue of the Sentinel asks.

  The Governor picks her glasses up off the table. She takes a deep breath as if she has a long answer, and then says simply, "No."

  The Sentinel reporter tries to clarify the Governor's response. "No, they haven't given you a forecast, or no, there's no rain in the future?" she asks.

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  "As far as they know, it's not going to rain. At least soon." Quickly Governor Webster smiles, and adds, "But who ever trusts the weatherman?" She looks at John Dexter, the meteorologist from the CBS station in Burlington in attendance, and says, "Isn't that right, John? You can't trust the weatherman?''

  He smiles good-naturedly and looks down at his shoes.

  "It'll rain a week from Monday. It'll pour," Peter DuBois, the administration secretary, whispers to me, his voice a soft whine. "After all, it's the Fourth of July, the one day each year when we all have to stand outside and watch our children march in parades."

  On Saturday afternoon Laura, Miranda, and I bump over the aging, rickety wooden bridge that leads to the hundreds of acres Elias Gray owns. I bring our truck to a stop when the bridge is behind us, and look up at the thin dirt road. Once, when the bridge was new and capable of supporting heavier loads, the road was an active logging highway. But that was years ago; Elias hasn't had loggers on this land in over forty years.

  "One of these days, that bridge is going to fall into the river," Laura says, although these days there isn't much river left. "Didn't there used to be some sort of sign warning against heavy loads?"

  "Yup. Anson Gray took it down two weeks ago, when the evaporator for the sugar house was being delivered. He didn't want to scare the delivery truck away."

  Laura nods. "Oh, good. Very responsible."

  Miranda sits between Laura and me in the long couch of the pick-up, occasionally staring up through the front windshield at the high, hot overhead sun.

  "Ready?" I ask the pair, before shifting the truck to bounce up the old dirt logging highway.

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  "Ready," they say in unison, and as three jerking, shaking, shuddering pistons we jostle our way up the mountain.

  "All I got to do is sit here and look ornery, and those boys keep up the pace," Elias says, smiling, from his perch on one of the thick tree stumps bordering the clearing for the sugar house.

  Those "boys"his thirty-year-old grandson Anson, and two of Anson's friendsare in the midst of hanging one of the two wide front doors. Even in the shade this deep in the woods, the ninety-degree heat is inescapable, and the shirts of the three men are soaked through with their sweat.

  But the work is worth that sweat. The sugar house is clean and new and almost finished. It's magnificent. The wooden shed rises two stories into the forest, with a metal chimney poking through the highest point of the roof. Inside, there is enough room for the six by eighteen foot evaporator Elias has purchased for his grandson, perhaps a half-dozen cords of wood to stoke the evaporator fire, and plenty of "extra" room to can and store the syrup.

  The whole area now has the wonderful smell of sawdust, and the wood and timbers are so fresh that they're almost pale yellow in color.

  Miranda rushes to a cleared spot about a dozen feet higher than the sugar house, and about fifteen yards away.

  "This is where I said the holding tanks should be!" she boasts to Laura and me. "This is just the spot!"

  Eventually, two monstrous vats will be placed where Miranda is standing. Anson may hook buckets to a few maple trees next March, but the days when sap is collected in individual buckets are largely gone. Instead, Anson and his two friends will attach milesliterally, three or four milesof rubber tubing to sugar maples throughout the forest, an interconnected spider's web that will collect the sap from the trees, and draw it eventually into the vats where Miranda is standing.

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  When there's a good run next March, the vats will have well over two thousand gallons of sap in them, waiting to be transferred into the evaporator in the sugar house and boiled down into syrup.

  "Yes, indeed," Elias agrees with Miranda. "That's just the spot. Good deal." He turns to my wife and says, "She takes after your sisteryour sister and you. She dowsed that spot yesterday in minutes."

  Laura shakes her head that he's wrong. "Patience has the real talent," she says, her voice almost wistful. "You know that. If she takes after anyone, she takes after her aunt."

  "Well, maybe when it comes to dowsing. But in a lot of other things, I'm glad she takes after you. You got on your hands a very sweet little girl."

  Laura nods, trying to accept the compliment with grace. But I know that it's hard for her, I know that it's frustrating. All of her life she has been the "sweet" sister, the "normal" sister, the "traditional" one. Meanwhile, it has always been Patience who has been the center of attention. Sometimes it's because of her dowsing achievements, other times it's because of her tantrums; sometimes it's the simple result of the daily lunacy that Patience Avery has always mistaken for conventional behavior; but, for a variety of reasons, Patience has always seemed to find a way to commandeer the spotlight. Sometimes this makes Laura jealous, and sometimes it makes her angry. Sometimes, it makes her both.

  "Thank you, Elias," she finally says to the old dowser.

  "Welcome."

  Miranda walks over to the men hanging the door, and watches cautiously from a few feet away. With his one free hand, Anson gives her a small salute.

  "Patience seemed pretty happy when she was here yesterday," Elias continues. "Happy for her, anyway. Is it Reedy?"

  Laura shrugs. "I don't know. I hope so. But I agree, she has seemed a little more serene than usual."

  "I sometimes wonder if I'm bad luck givin' her away. A jinx."

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  "I doubt that," Laura reassures him. "Whatever problems Patience had with her first two marriages had nothing to do with you."

  He pushes down on the stump with his hand, and rises slowly to his feet. "I told her Reedy was a good man," he says. "I never said that about the first two."

  "Did she agree?" I ask.

  There is a chorus of grunts and groans behind us as the three men try to line up the hinges on the door with the hinges screwed into the frame, while trying to steady the door less than a quarter of an inch above the ground.

  "About as much as Patience will agree with anything," Elias says. "So I kicked up my feet a bit. I warned her that it was about time she grew up, and lived up to that name of hers. I reminded her that men had a history of leaving her. And if any man was willing to just pick up and go somewhere, it was Reedy McClure."

  I find myself laughing, and from the corner of my eye watch Laura try hard not to smile. "You said all that to Patience?"

  Elias nods. "Sure did. Old man like me? Hell, I can say anything I damn well please and get away with it."

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  12

  Patience calls me at my office Tuesday afternoon. Although she says she is standing in Gertrude and Jeanette Scutter's kitchen, a good thirty-plus yards from the spot where a well is at that moment being drilled, I can hear clearly the sound of Michael Terry's four-story drill. It is not noise in the background, it is noise on the line beside Patience: an ear-splitting, teeth-shaking, window-rattli
ng, headache-inducing hammering.

  "If I bring Terry in here, will you talk to that idiot?" Patience shouts over the banging, the sound of a hundred pound hammer slamming its way through Vermont rock, a thousandperhaps morecrashes per minute.

  "What for?" I yell back, wondering if my sister-in-law can hear me. Two young associates, one a woman from Vermont Law School who graduated only last month, stand in the hall, watching me shout.

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  "That idiot brought his pounder!"

  "So?"

  "I asked him to bring his rotary drill!"

  "What difference does it make?"

  The sound is reminescent of a jackhammer, but louder: machine-gun-like bursts of blasting that fill the air, eventually deafening perhaps everyone who ever drills wells for a living.

  "It makes all the difference in the world! Some fat cat up in Stowe is getting his rotary drill, and your neighbors right here are getting the pounder!"

  "Both cut through the rock! Both will find a vein!" The two associates in my doorway are joined by Warren Birch, the three of them wondering why I am yelling. I point the phone's receiver in their direction so they too can appreciate Michael Terry's pounder. I smile.

  "You're all idiots!" I hear Patience shout, and I can almost see her shaking her head in disgust. "The pounder might divert the vein! It's shaking so much stuff up down there, it might move the goddamn water vein!"

  I rub my eyes. "But a rotary drill wouldn't?"

  "Less likely!"

  "So what do you want me to do, Patience?"

  "Talk to him, for God's sake! Tell him to stop using his goddamn pounder, and get his rotary drill up here this goddamn minute! It's a fragile vein they're about to tap, and I don't want them to divert it!"

  "Patience, I'm not going to do that!" I insist over the booming behind her. "Terry is already doing me a big favor! He's only charging the Scutters for the well casing and expenses! That will save them a couple thousand dollars!"

  "But he might move the veinand miss it!"

  I try a different tactic: "I doubt that! Patience Avery doesn't find movable veins"

  "Don't you dare put the onus on me, you smug little prick!" she hisses, and a split second later she slams down the phone and the line goes dead.

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  I was lucky, Michael Terry was lucky.

  The Scutters were very lucky.

  And Patience Avery's perfect record remained intact.

  Evidently, Michael Terry's pounder did not divert the vein Patience had dowsed. It hit a healthy vein of potable water at exactly four hundred and two feetexactly where Patience had said it would.

  For every member of the Copper Project in attendance, there is an employee of Powder Peak, or one of the restaurants and motels and clothing stores that ring the resort, and depend upon it for much of their business. For every person that Reedy McClure has convinced to take a seat tonight in Montpelier's Hammond Auditorium, there is one that Ian Rawls and I have had the local Chamber of Commerce coax there as well.

  All told, there may be as many as four hundred and fifty people at the hearing this evening, given the fact the auditorium seats four hundred, and there are a couple dozen people standing along the edges of the stage. And every single one of them is hot, ill-tempered, and sweating profusely. There is no air-conditioning in the auditorium, there are not even any fans. The air sits upon us like quilts, clothing sticks to us all as if held there by rubber cement.

  Sitting on the stage at the front of the room, behind a line of wobbly card tables, is the District Five Environmental Commission, three individuals chosen by the Governor and charged with giving and withholding building and land use permits for projects that might affect the environment.

  Projects such as Powder Peak's. Projects that tap rivers for water, or cut down trees for trails. Projects thatbased on the testimony of one professor from the University of Vermontcan adversely affect more than just our small corner of Vermont.

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  "That means," says the young professor in hiking boots and a blue blazer, a mugwump who has somehow managed to dress like me from the waist up and Reedy McClure from the waist down, "that the ozone layer is at least four or five percent gone over North America and Europe. It's disappearing much faster than we ever thought, faster than we even thought possible."

  I can't tell how much of his testimony Liza Eastwick, the Commission chairperson, believes, but I can see that the men sitting on either side of her buy every word of it.

  "Trees," the professor says, "are our future."

  "And our friends," Ian Rawls whispers sarcastically beside me. "Trees are our friends. Don't you just hate this sort of Arbor Day fanaticism?"

  I nod politely in agreement, although my feelings are far more mixed tonight than I can admit to the man who represents my client. Lately, the drought and the heat and the way my wife's and my daughter's vegetable garden is shriveling have begun to unnerve me. I tell myself that there is nothing wrong with cutting down a few trees on Mount Republica few miles of trees, if I am truly honest with myselfand tapping a river for snow, and in my head I still have no trouble believing this.

  But on some other level I find words like global warming frightening. Or ozone depletion. Greenhouse gases. Wetlands. Trout. Evergreens. Bears, moose, and deer.

  The evening becomes a battle of rhetoric and statistics.

  Ian Rawls cites the average annual snowfall in Burlington over the past few years, stammering out a staggering series of numbers: ninety-one inches of snow three winters back; sixty-eight inches two winters ago; and only forty-one inches this past winter. He tells the Commission that fewer people are skiing in Vermont every year, a result, he says, of increasingly poor snowfall.

  "The fact is," Ian concludes, "if we can't make more snow, we can't stay in business."

  "And do you know why it doesn't snow here the way it once

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  did?" an angry, middle-aged woman with a Copper Project button says, standing. "Because developers like Schuss Limited are destroying the atmosphere!"

  An expert I found from the National Weather Service testifies that the change in Vermont's climate has nothing to do with global warming.

  "It's a temporary aberration in the jet stream," she says. "The jet stream has moved about three hundred miles north of us. In time, the jet stream will move back south."

  Liza Eastwick asks Ian Rawls how many people Powder Peak currently employs.

  "About fifty people year-round, and about three hundred from November fifteenth through April fifteenth," he says.

  "There are also another five hundred jobs in related service industries that depend upon Powder Peak," I add.

  Liza looks down at her notes, and pulls the tortoiseshell barrette out of her hair. The woman has waist-length red hair, and there is something oddly provocative about the movement, something inappropriate and disarming.

  "Scottie," she says, looking up at me, "you have gone on record as saying the expansion would result in six hundred new jobs next year. Could you break that figure out?"

  I repeat the numbers I have mouthed over and over for weeks now: "In the short-term, the expansion will result in about two hundred construction jobssome this fall when the gondola is built, some next year when the new trails and the new snowmaking system are brought on-line. In the long run, however, the resort believes it will create anywhere between three hundred and five hundred jobs in the tourist industry. Motels. Restaurants. Bars. A lot will depend upon the overall economy, but the resort believes that three hundred is an absolute minimum."