Amesbury Archer

Some would call me a Dowser, others a Water-Witch, but I am far from either. Sensitivity to water can be both a great gift and a terrible burden. I was born in a small village in what was East Germany called Dorfgußstein. We were a community of farmers, and we were stricken by drought. Though my parents survived the war, the might not have survived the Trockenheit. I call it a drought, but in reality it was very much the opposite. We were living on a hard packed earth, so dense and impregnable that water would sheet off of it and turn the smallest of spring showers into streams. A bucket of water could be poured on one side of town and collected on the other an hour later. The ground would just not take the water. This sounds like a very slight problem, until you consider the sewage. Pipes backed up into houses into sinks into showers and bathes. One morning my mother might make a nice wurstchen in the toilet only to have it greet her in the evening poking forth from the upstairs washbasin. Mein gott! These were trying times!My parents were at the end of their wits, they had to save up enough money for us to move from this accused place. I was only a child of two, but i would take long walks through the cobbled stone streets, watching the neighbors bail full fecal buckets out their windows only for it to roll back on their doorsteps. Out in our once great turnip field I stumbled along feeling something that I never had before . . . emptiness. Something was drawing me forward, not a great treasure buried in the sand, rather the opposite, a collection of nothing, pulling. I felt the ground give way.My awakening began in a dry and dusty basin, many many feet below the surface of the field. I had a line of drool oozing from my mouth, and instead of collecting around my face it bubbled and SANK!I emerged from the whole with more than wonderment, but also a strong sense of natural bedrock, and water percolation. The town set to work, a fire line was made of buckets, and we dug ourselves out.Well now I stand before you a mature and enlightened man. My parents moved from Europe with the money received from my new found gift. It was once I came to America that I learned what my gift really meant. Only to be shunned by the powers that be. A professional Water Witch can make a hefty wage for an hours work, and be respected by the community. But when the ground turns to clay, and the septic backs up into a stewing foetid mound, we may need a new kind of witch...