HappyAcres has a propane cylinder, a 400' deep well, and a septic tank.
Ignoring the septic for 10 years, I finally call to have it inspected and cleaned.
How do you find a buried concrete tank? It's 4 feet down under hard soil. Somewhere.
Greg "witches" with a clothes-hanger.
The old-timers all witched, he says; now he's the only witcher left in his shop.
He needs to pinpoint the tank's access cap! Even a little bit off and you've dug a 4' hole for nothing.
You can guess how it ends...
He crisscrosses in a widening pattern until the clothes-hanger begins to twitch.
He invites me to try it -- but it doesn't twitch for me.
With a pickaxe and shovel he digs, and 15 minutes later he hits the cap. Dead on. First try.
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While he's working Greg tells stories:
One of his poker buddies illegally dredges gold in the American River. Five days a week, eight hours a day, this friend spends in a wet-suit on the bottom of a remote stretch of the South Fork. The snowmelt is always freezing cold. A vacuum rig suctions up the silt and gravel. It's a full-time job that nets about $100K a year.
Then several stories about smelling snakes. I'm sceptical, but he assures me that it's common knowledge that some folks can smell snakes. He has two friends who can smell snakes. One is a hunting buddy; they make him walk in front when they're in the woods. Another snake-smeller happens to be a lady. Once he was with her when she smelled a snake in a country store. Sure enough, she sniffed around and finally found it (to the store-owner's relief).
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