A Different Direction Dowsing Not A Miracle, Just A Way Of Life, For An Old-Time Eastern Washington Farmer

At 90, he can still count on one hand the number of times he’s seen a doctor.

With his determined gait, huge appetite and cobalt blue eyes, Owen Lehto is a picture of health.

By 7 a.m. he’s shuttling wheelbarrows of hay to the horses and gardening at his family’s ranch, which sits on a dead-end road where farm fields and pine stands mingle between Cheney and Spokane.

For most of this century, this sturdy Finn has rejected the traditional medical establishment in favor of an ancient, mysterious and controversial technique called dowsing.

Dowsers believe they can sense electrical energy and thereby locate water and objects, or even evaluate health.

Long before this decade’s New Agers consulted alternative health guru Andrew Weil, even before the ‘60s Age of Aquarius sparked interest in the unproven and esoteric, Lehto says he had a special sensitivity toward what most people call gut feelings.

In fact, he says his hunches feel like electrical impulses running through his right arm, causing it to swing clockwise or counterclockwise depending on whether the electrical charge is negative or positive.

Relatives call it “chaining,” because of the silver, dime-store chain he uses to measure the sensation that causes his arm to swing. Others call it divining, or water witching, although he uses his arm instead of a forked stick as his divining rod.

Alongside a regimen of hard work, clean living and faith in God, Lehto’s learned to live his life by dowsing. He does “body counts” to determine if he - or others - are nutrient-deficient, and believes dowsing can relieve pain.

Skeptics and believers have battled for centuries over the validity of dowsing, each side unable to persuade the other using reasoning or experiments. In the January issue of Skeptical Inquirer, University of California-San Diego behavioral physiology professor J.T. Enright said dowsing is “widely regarded among serious scientists as no more than a superstitious relic from medieval times.”

Over the years, Lehto has accepted that some people will accuse him of witchery, chastise his ways as pagan, or dismiss it as flummery that defies science and reason.

“I always had that feeling through the years,” he says of the vibration that sways his right arm. “I’d tell others and they’d say `you’re crazy.’ I just don’t pay any attention to them.”

Now, decades after he first published a book on the subject, his folksy nutrition and horticulture manual “Vibrations” is in demand again and recently went through another printing.

He explains it like this: All living matter has energy. That energy causes electrical vibrations that anyone can sense, with an open mind and practice.

“We were all given that power by God and so were our ancestors,” he says. “Each person has a different power, some of them use it and a big share of them won’t …” He’s been dowsing for more than 50 years, and says the older he gets, the sooner he can feel the electrical sensation that causes his arm to swing.

In a demonstration for a reporter, his eyes flutter closed as he concentrates on a paper napkin dampened with a dab of saliva. With his left index finger, he touches sample tablets of vitamins and minerals. In the other hand, he holds his chain over the napkin. The chain begins to move in small circles from what he says is the electrical pulse in his arm. As he touches each sample vitamin, the chain moves a certain number of times, which he records on a form. After calculating the figures, he announces that his visitor is healthy, but high in chromium and calcium - coincidentally, the two supplements taken that morning with coffee.

He says he’s conducted this unscientific saliva test for hundreds, with enough accuracy to prompt phone calls from doctors and others.

“He helped me, and a couple of patients,” said James Eifling, a chiropractor and clinical nutritionist near Brownsville, Texas.

Eifling practices contact reflex analysis, a method of using the body’s muscle reflexes to determine causes of health problems. He plans to travel to Spokane this summer to meet Lehto and learn more about his method.

“People used to be able to do what he does. It’s an intuitive art that is becoming lost.”

Many are quick to discredit the body’s innate intelligence and ability to detect internal electrical impulses, Eifling said. “My definition of scientific is, if it works it’s scientific.”

But Lehto doesn’t preach dowsing, says Joyce Van Deest, the daughter of Lehto’s second wife, Helen, who died in 1996.

“He doesn’t think of it as anything extraordinary, he just lives his life that way.”

Lehto says he honed his dowsing skill over time, but he started with soil and water, after graduating in horticulture from Washington State University in 1935.

Perplexed by why seedlings would thrive in some spots and die a few feet away, he began using dowsing to test soil, water and plant health. Positive or negative electrical currents made his right arm turn either clockwise or counterclockwise. He learned to plant in areas that gave off a positive current.

He practiced his technique in labs and in nature, at nurseries, parks and landscaping jobs.

After returning from World War II, Lehto bought a ranch in Monroe, Wash., with his first wife, Ellen, a hospital dietitian who died in 1981. Combining their knowledge of dietetics and horticulture, they experimented while raising chickens, cattle and organic crops.

One of Lehto’s first strong signals came in the spring of 1948, he says, as he puzzled over a calf refusing to eat in a certain section of a field. Holding his hand over the grass, he recalls feeling a current so strong it made his heart feel weak.

Speculating the current was related to nearby standing water, he moved the cow to higher ground and started testing other water on his property. A few weeks later, he decided the sensation was electrical after his cat was shocked by a spark from the chain he was using to dowse.

Friends and family say he’s used dowsing to relocate gardens so they thrive, locate missing objects, and find wells.

“There are people who think it’s witchery and people who think it’s scientifically silly,” says Flint Van Deest, Lehto’s stepson-in-law, with whom he lives. But when someone can find water in front of your eyes, “it just seems to play out,” he says.

Lehto has helped Van Deest locate irrigation lines, wells, even a phone line running crooked through the property. He said he’s located hundreds of wells for residents in Arizona and the Northwest, including Margaret Morris of Bonners Ferry, Idaho.

“We know he’s genuine. We send hundreds to Owen,” said Morris, who has referred friends to Lehto since he successfully dowsed her family’s well. “He’s very sensitive. He’s remarkable.”

Lehto’s pharmaceutical rebellion began as a child when he disobeyed his mother and threw an expensive bottle of allergy medication into a nearby creek.

His father, a coal miner, dairy farmer and furniture maker near Wilkeson, Wash., a small town west of Mount Rainier, was more loyal to natural ways. Lehto remembers he prescribed Finnish sauna baths to sweat out disease.

His mother died when Lehto was 13. His father died two years later in a mysterious fire, leaving the boy with only God, memory and instinct as guidance.

For months he lived with an unkind foster family and supported himself stripping cherry bark to sell to a cough syrup company. After finishing eighth grade in 1923, he boarded a bus for Seattle with $80 in his pocket.

He worked through high school with odd jobs at the docks, knitting mills and logging and farming operations. But worsening allergies eventually prevented employment in dusty mills or around mechanical fumes.

He controlled his allergies by eating only bananas and slowly adding agreeable foods. Later, he and Helen recorded years of food-testing observations while living near Keller, Wash. She encouraged him to put his findings, theories and dowsing anecdotes into a book. From 1974 to 1978, 1,000 copies of the simply written spiral-bound manual were published. To meet demand this decade, another 2,000 updated versions were printed in 1992 and 1997.

Next week, he turns 91.

“It’s a gift from God and I want to keep myself healthy,” he says. “And if it can help people, I want to share it.”

1. FOR MORE For more information on dowsing, visit The American Society of Dowsers home page at http:/ /newhampshire.com/dowsers.orgFor a Web site with links to both pro and con views on dowsing, go to http:/ /www.phact.org/e/dowsing.htm

2. LONGEVITY Owen Lehto’s tips for healthy living No loafing, keep working Break a sweat every day Take longer strides Stand up straight Drink water Be positive and observant Don’t smoke or drink Pray