DITCH WALKER JOB

 As I was reading my weekly edition of the Capital Press, an agriculture newspaper, I came across a part time job in the help wanted section of the classifieds as a ditch walker in Baker County, Oregon.    Now you are probably asking yourself , what is a ditch walker?   

This reminded me of my younger days working for my dad in the rice fields in the Sacramento Valley of northern California.    As soon as the rice fields were prepared in the spring, water was released from a system of canals to flood the fields before rice seed could be sown by an air plane.   On one occasion I took it upon myself to turn on two electric pumps along a secondary canal to start flooding a field.   When I got home that night my dad told me he received a call from the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District that they turned off the pumps because they had not received an order from him for water for this particular field.   This is when I learned water had to be allocated prior to irrigating a field to determine the fee to charge the farmer based on acre-feet of water to be allocated for each field and increase the flow of water in the canal system according to the District's allocation from the USDI Bureau of Reclamation.   There was a man, who worked for the irrigation district, called the ditch tender and his job was to drive and walk canals looking for any leaks, such as rat holes, facility problems with steel gates, diversion dams and illegal withdraw of water.   After this learning process I started noticing the local ditch tender driving around more often, probably checking on me.