“The river was no longer a river, and the desert was no longer a desert”

“The river was no longer a river, and the desert was no longer a desert” is Ben Givens’s reckoning with the changed Columbia Basin: irrigation has turned remembered sagebrush country into fields and orchards, while the river that made this cultivation possible has been diverted from its former course. The sentence compresses the novel’s central environmental contradiction into a balanced pair: the land appears more productive, yet its former identities and ecologies have been displaced.

A Landscape Remade by Water

The expression comes as Ben Givens travels north through country that once belonged to his childhood. From the road, fields of seed peas, potatoes, alfalfa, peppermint, and wheat replace what he remembers as sagebrush wastes broken by coulees and willow draws. The river has been carried across the land to seep into crop roots rather than run freely in its bed. This is not an abstract change in scenery: the altered watercourse explains both the agricultural landscape before him and the distance between it and the country he knew.

The contrast has a long view. Ben Givens was born upriver from Vantage, before there were dams; later, the Columbia appears behind Wanapum Dam as a still, flat green lake. On the bus toward Wenatchee, the river country is likewise marked by dams, orchards, and industry. The remembered fast river and the contemporary managed waterscape are two phases of the same place, seen across the span of one life.

The Orchard’s Abundance and Labor

The change has made possible the orchards that define Ben Givens’s family history. His parents’ orchard on the east bank of the Columbia River included thirteen acres of Golden Delicious apples, two acres each of Winesaps and Rome Beauties, and eight acres of cherries and apricots. The farmhouse, irrigation ditches, sheds, barns, and rows of trees made cultivation a whole material world, not simply a picturesque alternative to the desert.

That world depended on seasonal work. Ben Givens made apple boxes, tended the garden and animals, helped clear irrigation ditches, planted and pruned trees, and propped branches against the weight of fruit. In the harvest scene, migrant workers—including the Emery family and Rachel Lake—join him and his father to pick cherries. Later, the road to Wenatchee is crowded with pickers, ladders, bins, tractors, and fully loaded haul trucks. The orchards are visibly fruitful, but that abundance is also a labor system, sustained by workers whose presence the landscape’s pastoral appearance might otherwise obscure.

Acknowledgment of Complicity

Ben Givens does not treat the transformation as an evil imposed by strangers. He recognizes that he helped burn the sage lands and that men like his father claimed the river for irrigation and fruit growing without intending harm. They were confident in their rights to the water, but, in Ben Givens’s judgment, ignorant of what their certainty would cost. His own life spans both the old river and the orchards, leaving him attached to each while aware that their claims conflict.

The passage sharpens that conflict through an analogy: loving the river while helping to kill it for apple production makes no more sense than loving small birds while shooting them over pointing dogs. The comparison connects environmental alteration to Ben Givens’s troubled understanding of hunting. In both cases, affection for the living world coexists with practices that destroy parts of it. The expression is therefore not just a lament for lost wilderness; it is an admission that the speaker’s attachments and actions are entangled in the loss.

The Desert’s Persistence

On the road to George, Washington, Ben Givens sees another boundary between cultivated land and desert: the fields end abruptly, and the uncultivated steppe remains beautiful but exposed. The sage has been pulled out by the roots, while the apparent fertility of the irrigated fields is, to him, false and dependent on water continuing to arrive. If it stops, the crops will die of thirst; the land, he thinks, desires dryness.

This later view complicates the earlier sentence. The river and desert have been transformed, but the arid plateau has not vanished; cultivation covers it, and its underlying conditions remain. The landscape’s abundance is contingent rather than final. Set against the orchards’ harvest and the remembered river, the expression marks both an irreversible alteration and the limits of that alteration: people can redirect water and remake a country, but cannot make its ecological history disappear.