Rick Moody - The Diviners

He asks his mother if she’ll at least let him go for a walk, to think things over. She’s kept him inside these last few days. Since Tyrone came home, Max hasn’t even gone to school, and he’s going as crazy as his brother. Anything to get out of the car, anything to get out of her sight, anything to have a moment in the company of nature.

“You could just take me over to —”

“Oh, to the —”

If it’s those woods she can hardly refuse him, because those woods have literary pedigree, and whenever Max seems to be living inside the parental dream of a fine education, no problem. So she takes the county road, congested during the evening commute, and soon she is alongside the celebrated pond. Deborah pulls the car over, and Max gets out of the car and says he’ll be back in ten.

He had school lectures in these woods, he had plant identification classes. He knows the varieties of ferns, Christmas fern and ebony spleenwort, and a good portion of the birches and firs and maples. He can identify the nuthatches and the wrens and the warblers, chickadees, and red-winged blackbirds; according to his indoctrination, he recognizes part of the Utopian vision of Eduardo Alcott, whose goal is the rescue of Gaia, or Mother Earth, from the one true pest species, Homo sapiens sapiens.

Naturally, there is more to the Alcott narrative than Max has told his mother. There is more to the story than the rights of the forest, the rights of Mother Earth to be free from the meddling of the human animal. For example, with each of the Retrievalists, Eduardo attempted to inculcate a particular environmental skill. With Nina, Eduardo taught her to fire rifles and shotguns, so that she might use these to prune the population of hunters and sportsmen; and with Glenn, Eduardo taught him to lay traps. (In fact, Glenn came out of his training well-versed in survivalist techniques, which is probably going to come in handy during his summer job at the local nursery, where he will be heaving bags of pine bark nuggets into the backs of sport utility vehicles.)

What Eduardo taught Max was the skill of divining. This may have been an indication of some special esteem for Maximillian because divining, as Eduardo put it, was the most recondite of these Retrievalist disciplines. There had to be complete trust for the lessons to take place, there had to be an absence of worldly distractions, there had to be attention and humility. Eduardo took Max out into the dwindling forests of the region. Sometimes they went driving for an hour or more to find a suitable place. They went to the old New England, the vanishing New England, the New England of gothic tales and Indian clashes. Then, when the forest was thick enough, Eduardo would pass on the arcana of dowsing.

The first thing to learn was that there was no explanation for what was about to take place. There was no empirical explanation as to why it worked, any more than it was possible to explain why Catholicism worked. If you believed, it did. Perhaps dowsing had something to do with geology, and with the geological history that was imprinted in each and every human body; or perhaps it had something to do with magnetism, with the tiny particles that conveyed the universal force known as electromagnetism; or perhaps it had something to do with Druidic wisdom, the white magic of the Druids that the Romans failed to suppress; or perhaps it had to do with auras and chi energy and the orphic wisdom of New Age bookshops, like the bookshop two doors down from the Krispy Kreme restaurant of Concord. Whatever the cause, dowsing worked. This was the first lesson: Utilize, don’t analyze.

They were up near Monadnock, the most hiked mountain in the United States. “Science is the stooge of capitalism,” Eduardo was saying. “Science serves the pig. It has no creative abilities, it has only this tendency to do what is expected of it, which is to accept the logic of product and the merchandising that is its lifeblood. The vassals of capitalism do as they are told. And the vassals of capitalism are research and development lackeys. So don’t believe that this skill I’m teaching has anything to do with science.”

These were the lessons of the survivalist cadres, of Maoist guerrillas in the Amazon. And to prove the lie of science, Eduardo now grasped his Y rod, the traditional forked stick of divining — a polished piece of the witch hazel — and he held the ends of the stick between the third and fourth fingers of his upturned hands, thumbs on the ends, as he explained to Max, with the point of the stick upward. Then he spun in a clockwise direction, eyes closed, so that the strain and anxiety of Eduardo’s veined face yielded a little bit. He went on spinning until an incredible thing happened, a thing that even Max was able to witness, notwithstanding disbelief. The stick seemed to tremble violently at first and then, despite all the energy that Eduardo used against it, the stick began to fight its way in a downward direction, until it was drooping past the median point of Eduardo’s belt line. It was now definitely pointing toward the earth. Eduardo came to a stop, opened his eyes, and, grinning, he pronounced the results of his experiment: “I am now facing magnetic north.”

He explained that the forked stick, in terms of design, was mainly of interest as an antique. Nobody used the forked stick anymore, really. What they used were metal rods, L-shaped rods, like this:

and these metal rods were contained in plastic sleeves, usually the grips from bicycle handles. You could make the L rods from conventional wire coat hangers, the kind you might get at your neighborhood dry cleaner. You placed them in the bicycle handles, Eduardo said. And then you went out into the natural world and you waited to see what the metal rods would tell you. If the rods fanned out in a V shape, that was a “yes,” and if the rods crossed their tips that was also a “yes,” in reply to whatever question you were asking, such as whether there was water in a place or whether there was a vein of silver ore. Only if the rods failed to react was the answer in the negative.

“For today,” Eduardo said, “we will content ourselves with finding potable water, since that’s a bit of magic that you can easily make use of. Let’s empty our canteens first, so that we can experience the sensation of thirst like our revolutionary brothers in the Mexican desert. And then we will see what we can see.”

He took the L rods from the small kit bag he’d brought, an old messenger’s bag with the name of a local newspaper fading from its side. And he presented the L rods and the grips to Max in his brusque way.

“You try.”

While Max was getting used to the feel of the grips, Eduardo was giving him the second lesson. The second lesson was as follows: It is not in the material of the divining rod that the divination resides but in the dowser himself. Didn’t matter what you used, Eduardo said, and the excessive attention that some people paid to the Y rod and its perfect varnish was fetishistic and against the spirit of dowsing. Some people used fishing weights on fishing line and they held aloft this little pendulum item and they waited for it to arc back and forth. Some people, Eduardo said, used their hands alone. They went into the woods with their hands aloft, in a receptive state, and they waited until they felt their palms get moist or they waited for the hairs to stand up on their arms, at which point they knew they were in the presence of silver or gold or other eternal mysteries.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Ask it.”

“Ask it what?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Is there water?”

“Be more specific.”