Autumn

Autumn is both a working season and a turning point in Ben Givens’s sense of time: it brings the apple harvest into view, carries him through changing landscapes on his journey home, and helps him recognize that he still wants to live in the world he has known. Across the novel, seasonal change connects the physical labor of the orchards with memory, loss, and the possibility of return.

The Orchard’s Year

The Givens family orchard on the east bank of the Columbia River is defined by recurring work. Its thirteen acres of Golden Delicious apples, two acres each of Winesaps and Rome Beauties, and eight acres of cherries and apricots are part of a farm whose seasons determine what must be done. Ben grows up making apple boxes from pine shook, milking cows twice daily, and working with his father and Aidan Givens. Spring brings planting, pollinating hives, and clearing weeds from irrigation ditches; summer requires disking between the rows, thinning fruit, and propping or tying branches against the weight of the crop. In August the picking begins, while fall and winter bring pruning and the burning of water sprouts. Autumn therefore belongs to a cycle of work rather than to a pause between seasons.

The harvest also makes the orchard a place of collective labor. In one June, when cherries ripen early, Wright Givens sets the eleventh as the first day of picking. Ben works alongside migrant laborers, including the Emery family, and Rachel Lake, who has come from Waterville, Maine, to stay for the harvest. The picking proceeds row by row, with ladders and buckets; cherries strike the bottoms of the buckets, and fruit must be gathered with stems intact. When the afternoon heat softens the cherries, the work stops and the filled fruit is hauled to the siding for pickup. This early-summer scene establishes the season-by-season rhythm behind the later autumn harvest: fruit, weather, and labor shape the days together.

Autumn’s Working Landscape

By October, the orchards are again full of movement, now around apples. Driving along Joe Miller Road, Ben passes sidings crowded with bins and sees pickers working among the trees. Some rest in small groups, but most continue with what the narration presents as the patient intensity of harvest. Coats and hats hang from branches; canteens and bottles are propped among them; dogs lie in the grass while children sprawl in the sun. Pickers fill their bags high in the trees, then descend and ease apples into bins to avoid bruising them. The scene makes autumn visible through its practical details: the ladders, props, containers, and careful handling required to bring the crop in.

This is not an untouched pastoral landscape. The present-day drive passes an old apple-yard terminal that is empty of apples, with abandoned rail buildings and sun-bleached bins, while nearby orchards still send full bins to their sidings. The contrast places agricultural memory beside visible change. Farther on, the Stemilt Hill orchards extend toward Jump-Off Ridge, and a pond lies in the shade where Stemilt Creek leaves the mountains. Ben points across the river and tells Emilio that he grew up there. The autumn landscape is thus also a route through places that link his present journey to his childhood.

Crossing the Mountains in October

On the journey west with Bea Harden, the season changes with the terrain. They come over Ryegrass Summit into the Quilomene and the Kittitas Valley, where trees along Manastash Ridge have turned russet red and yellow. Bea observes that October is beautiful on this side of the mountains; Ben agrees that fall is more vivid here than on the coast, while noting the coast’s more temperate weather and fewer extremes. Their exchange gives seasonal beauty a measure of difference and cost: each region offers something the other does not.

The westward crossing also changes the surrounding vegetation and weather. They leave sage and canyons behind and approach snow-covered mountains, with forests on Easton Ridge and softened light. Near the Stampede Pass cutoff, Cascade blueberries color old clear-cuts in burnished red among mountain heathers, forming a heath-like landscape. At Snoqualmie Pass, they stop at the Traveler’s Rest. Ben has no appetite, but thanks Bea for taking him home. The journey’s autumn scenery accompanies a practical return, moving him from the dry country of orchards and canyons toward the forests and mountains of the west.

Season, Memory, and the Will to Live

Autumn connects the landscape Ben remembers with the landscape he encounters now. His childhood orchard is recalled not as scenery alone but as a place made by labor, weather, and repeated seasonal tasks; the contemporary October drive shows fruit still being picked, even as the old terminal stands empty. Against those images of continuity and change, Ben recognizes, in a cherry orchard in midautumn, that he wants to live and to have and hold a world containing such things. His physical collapse follows, so the recognition does not erase his suffering. Instead, the season gives his changed desire a concrete object: an orchard, its fruit, and the living world he had been ready to leave.

The seasonal pattern also shapes how the novel brings memory into the present. June cherries, August picking, fall apples, and winter pruning belong to a recurring agricultural calendar, while the October journey is a particular passage home. Autumn gathers those rhythms without reducing them to a simple emblem of decline: it is a time of harvest and exhaustion, vivid color and dying foliage, remembered childhood and present labor. Its significance lies in that double movement, as the landscape carries Ben toward home while making renewed attachment to life imaginable.