Dot Pitless keeps a clipboard on the dash of her truck, wedged between a clamp meter and a weighted steel tape. On it are names written in three colors of ink. She is a licensed pump installer in Oxford County, Maine, and she has firm opinions about pressure switches. She also does not exist. Neither does the fall of 2029, where we found her. At press time, that year had not yet gotten around to happening.
The drought that made her job is real. In the fall of 2026, Maine began counting its dry wells, mostly by asking people to report their own. By October 15, the Maine Emergency Management Agency had logged 156 reports for the year, up from 39 in early September.1 An agency official cautioned that some of the jump might mean people had found the reporting form, and not that the ground had shifted beneath them.2
The ground was shifting anyway. USGS monitoring wells in Oxford and at Clayton Lake hit record lows, below the levels of the early-2000s drought that older Mainers still use as a yardstick. The state said the drought would likely carry into 2027.1 Drillers were still catching up on wells that had gone dry the year before. Few people held drilling licenses, and some who did were elderly and no longer working.2 Households described waiting until December, or spring, for a rig, and meanwhile showering at gyms and hauling laundry to town.1 After one meeting, the agency summed it up without decoration: "Well driller wait lists were a top item."3 Maine had been here before. After the 1999–2002 drought, some 17,000 private wells went dry, and drillers kept waiting lists then too.4
So the 2026 numbers are on the record. Dot is invented, along with her call list, her rules and whatever she does with that clamp meter. Somewhere in Maine, real technicians are working out those same rules right now, without a magazine riding shotgun.
We rode with her on a Tuesday in late October, between a dairy barn in Paris (the Oxford County one, fewer croissants) and a farmhouse in Sumner. The cab smelled of coffee and PVC primer.
Start with the ink. What do the colors mean?
Dot: Black is "they say it's dry." Red is "I looked, and it's dry." Green is "I looked, and it isn't." Green's my favorite color in the whole box. Green means somebody keeps their money, and a spot on a driller's list goes back to someone who actually needs the rig.
How often does "dry" turn out to be something else?
Dot: My notebook says about one in three. But my notebook is me with a pen, so, grain of salt.
(She taps the clamp meter, which reads the current running through a wire without anyone having to cut into it.)
Before anybody says the word "drill," I find out what's actually going on. Breaker first, then the pressure tank. Then I clamp this on the pump wire. A pump running dry pulls light, because it's got nothing to push. A seized pump pulls heavy. A pressure switch with cooked contacts pulls nothing at all, and meanwhile the whole family's in the kitchen convinced the aquifer packed up and moved to Vermont.
After that I drop the tape and find the water. Then I tell them what I found. What I think comes later, and I tell them it's only what I think.
That order seems to matter a lot to you.
Dot: It's the whole job. Okay. My first drought fall, I'm out in Buckfield. Dug well, stone-lined, older than the house. The water's a puddle at the bottom. The woman asks me, is it done? And I say yes, call a driller. I said it like a doctor.
She called, and they put her on a list for spring. She spent the winter hauling laundry to town and showering at the Y. Come April, the snowmelt came and the dug well came back. Full. She called to tell me, and she wasn't mad, which was worse. Then the next August it went dry again, her driller finally showed up, and she got her drilled well. So was I wrong?
(A long pause. A logging truck passes.)
I still don't know. That's the lesson, if you want one. I can't tell what the ground's going to do, and neither can the ground.
So now I hand it over in pieces. Here's the pump. Here's the water level. Here's how fast it comes back after I pull it down. Recovery, we call it, and nobody ever asks about it, and it's the number that matters most. Slow and dead are two different diagnoses. People live fine on a slow well with a few hundred gallons of storage in the cellar and a little booster pump. Or take a drilled well that "went dry" at two-sixty. Half the time the pump's just hung for the water table of 1994. Lower it forty feet and you're back in business.
And deeper is a bet. People hear "drill deeper" like it's penicillin. There are wells around here past four hundred feet that recover like a teenager on a Saturday.5 Depth matters. So does what hill you're on, and what the rock is up to down there.
I won't promise rock. Rock never promised me anything.
So who goes first?
Dot: The ground decides before I do. Anything that needs a trench through the yard has to beat the frost. Work in a cellar can wait for January. So the first sort is just a calendar.
After that come my rules, which are mine and nobody else's. Somebody on home dialysis goes near the top, because that's a lot of water every single day and you don't get to skip. Then livestock. A milking cow drinks about a bathtub a day, and she doesn't understand "spring." Then farms with grant money on a clock, because a contract can lapse while the farmer waits on a driller, and that money might not come around twice.3 Then kids. Then everybody else, which is most people, and that's the part I lie awake over.
Where does an eighty-year-old living alone land?
Dot: Above a family of five with a minivan and a gym membership. Below a Holstein.
(She winces.)
Print that and I'll get letters. Look, they all tell me they're fine. "Fine," in Maine, means somebody's eighty-one and carrying jugs up the cellar stairs. So I bump them up. Quietly. Don't tell the minivan.
Has anyone tried to buy their way up the list?
Dot: A man in Hebron offered me a snowmobile. I said, Gary, it's a drought, what am I going to ride it on? He said it was a very good snowmobile. I'm sure it was.
(Laughs.)
I accept pies. Pies don't move you up. Pies are just pies.
The state counts dry wells now. Does that help you?
Dot: It helps somebody, I'm sure. But every fall I hear, "I reported it, so when are they coming?" And I have to say, hon, that form is a survey. It counts you. It doesn't send a truck.1 Nobody's coming. I'm coming. Eventually.
Most of what I see are dug wells, the shallow old ones, which lines up with what the state's numbers showed back in '26.5 It's the deep ones that scare me, though. You expect the shallow ones to go. When a deep one goes, you start wondering what else you were wrong about.
What do you owe the people you can't reach this month?
Dot: A real date. Even a bad one. "Spring" is a terrible thing to hear in October, and it's worse to work it out on your own in February. So I call every two weeks, even with no news. Especially with no news.
I owe them the right words, too. When the pump's running again, I say "you've got flow." Water is what you've got after you disinfect and the bacteria test comes back clean. People want one moment where it's over, and there isn't one.
Oh, and I tell every last one of them not to put anything into the well from outside.5 A fella in Rumford topped off his dug well from his neighbor's pool. He chlorinated it, sure. Among other things.
Does it ever feel like you're the one rationing the water?
Dot: Yes.
Then why stay in the trade?
Dot: Who else is going to do it? The men who taught me still have their licenses. Their backs retired years ago.2 Somebody's got to look down the hole and say what's really there. That's...
(She starts the truck, then stops.)
Telling people the truth is a kind of water.
Is that corny? That's corny. Don't print that.
At the farmhouse in Sumner, the pressure switch was fine, and so was the pump. She paid out a long stretch of tape before it came back wet. Then she wrote the family's name in red, sat with the pen for a second, and went inside to give them a date she didn't like.
Footnotes
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Maine Emergency Management Agency, "Multi-Year Water Resources Drought Likely to Carry Over Into 2027," October 16, 2026. https://www.maine.gov/mema/news/multi-year-water-resources-drought-likely-carry-over-2027-fri-10162026-1200 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4
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Maine Morning Star, "Despite recent rain, drought has reached all areas of Maine," October 16, 2026. https://mainemorningstar.com/2026/10/16/despite-recent-rain-drought-has-reached-all-areas-of-maine/ ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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Maine Morning Star, syndicated on Yahoo News, October 2026. https://www.yahoo.com/news/weather-news/articles/despite-recent-rain-drought-reached-211204799.html ↩ ↩2
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Portland Press Herald, "As southern Maine's drought deepens, homeowners with shallow dug wells get desperate," September 28, 2016. https://www.pressherald.com/2016/09/28/as-drought-deepens-homeowners-with-shallow-dug-wells-get-desperate/ ↩
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WMTW (Emily Pike), "Maine's worsening drought leaves more wells dry," via NewsBeep, October 23, 2026. https://www.newsbeep.com/us/891908/ ↩ ↩2 ↩3
