What does a ditch rider do? I was about to find out. It was late July up on Dead Ox Flat in eastern Oregon, just past sunrise. The air cool, no hint of the heat to come (110 by afternoon). Scent of sage. Sound of water gushing from siphon into canal. This land was desert when the wagons lumbered along the Oregon Trail not far from here, and Dead Ox Flat was still desert in 1939 when Dorothea Lange photographed this siphon, built in 1937 to bring the water that transformed sagebrush desert into fields of alfalfa and sugar beets.

Following the water from dam to farm, I learned how to move water and park it, to read weir blade and water level, to translate acre feet to second feet. Now I look at this scene and see the whole system: from the reservoir forty miles to the south, its watershed reaching into Nevada, to the tail, the spill to the Snake River, about thirty miles north of here. The water flows: in canals, siphons, and ditches, down drops and slides, through weirs. It wells up in bubblers, sprays from nozzles, pours from siphon tubes into furrows, seeps into soil. In this complex system, the ditch rider is key. He moves the water, calculates and adjusts its flow, delivers it, accounts for it, frees weirs plugged by tumble mustard, watches canal banks for signs of a breach.

How I found myself in the company of ditch riders in eastern Oregon where I met families Dorothea Lange photographed and others who took their farms out of the sage brush in the 1930s is a long story, told in my book, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field, which will be published next year. The stories Lange told in 1939 are still unfolding; somehow, in the process of tracing her stories, they became my own. A Daring to Look website, with photographs of then and now will complement the book. Follow the link from my homepage (web.mit.edu/spirn) later this year.

Looking at Landscape, an exhibit of photographs by Alex MacLean, Camilo José Vergara, and myself, closes at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in January and will be at the New York Hall of Science from February through May. Watch for the new West Philadelphia Landscape Project website, now in preparation (www.wplp.net); the launch will mark a new phase of WPLP.

Best wishes for the year.