Colockum Country

Colockum Country is the landscape where Ben Givens grows up amid orchard work, hunting, and horseback travel, and where the land becomes inseparable from his relationship with Aidan Givens. Set between the cultivated river country and the open, dry uplands, it is both a place of demanding seasonal labor and a refuge for the brothers’ excursions; their return rides make its familiar ground newly charged with the prospect of separation.

Setting and Working Landscape

The Givens family orchard lies on the east bank of the Columbia River, with rows of fruit trees descending toward the water and Lombardy poplars sheltering the orchards. The farm is a complex working place: irrigation ditches cross the planted rows, branch props support fruit-laden limbs, and sheds, a barn, stables, and picker shanties serve the harvest. The orchard’s scale is specific—thirteen acres of Golden Delicious apples, two acres each of Winesaps and Rome Beauties, and eight acres of cherries and apricots—while the surrounding country opens into buttes, coulees, canyons, and arid expanses.

The setting is organized by seasonal labor rather than by scenery alone. Ben makes apple boxes, tends the kitchen garden, splits wood, and milks cows; he and Aidan clear weeds from irrigation ditches by hand. They plant and remove trees in spring, disc between orchard rows in early summer, prop and strap branches as fruit develops, and pick in August before the winter pruning. The repeated work binds the family to the land, while the orchards’ edge marks a sharp transition from cultivated rows to the desert country beyond.

Routes into the Uplands

Ben and Aidan take dogs into the dry country to hunt quail, chukars, and sage grouse, sometimes riding out on horseback with shotguns and canteens. On overnight trips they cook birds over twig fires and talk beneath the open sky. The uplands are not simply a backdrop to recreation: their distances, exposed camps, and changing weather shape the brothers’ shared routines and give them a place apart from the daily demands of the orchard.

A more formal route through the country is the Colockum Stagecoach Road. When Ben is ten, he rides into the hills with Aidan and their father, Wright Givens, crossing the river at Coleman's Landing and following the road through new snow. They find no deer sign, but camp on a bench overlooking the river. Around the fire, Wright describes the road’s earlier hardships: wagons were lowered toward Wenatchee by rope, with trees dragged behind their axles to help brake them. The tale places the family’s present-day ride within a longer history of travel through this difficult terrain.

A Last Ride and Its Return

Fifteen months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Aidan is drafted into the Army. Before leaving, he asks for one last ride in Colockum Country. He and Ben cross the Columbia River at Coleman's Landing, ride through Dry Springs Canyon, and make camp near Spring Gulch after Aidan shoots two blue grouse. The wind drives the campfire’s smoke away, and Aidan says he can smell rain approaching. In the morning, after eating their last apricots, the brothers ride to a ridge and look across the river toward the sage plateau. Ben wonders why they never climbed the distant mountains; Aidan answers that they are too far away, a plain remark that gives their shared landscape a newly felt limit.

They ride back all day, cross the river by the Colockum Ferry, and reach the orchard at dusk. Their tired return becomes a quiet procession between the rows, with Aidan running his hands over the limbs as he passes. The country’s significance lies in this conjunction of work, memory, and parting: the same ground that has offered the brothers room to ride and hunt leads them back to the orchard and the life Aidan is about to leave.