Rock Island is both a geographical point of return for Ben Givens and a remembered landscape shaped by family labor. He identifies it as the place where he was born and where he is going home; his memories fill in that destination with orchards on the Columbia River, a demanding agricultural calendar, and a small country school. On the journey back, the river’s changed course makes the distance between childhood memory and present-day landscape visible.

Geography and the remembered river

Ben describes his birthplace as roughly thirty miles upriver from Vantage, beyond the canyon and around several bends. He remembers the country as it was before the dams. The distinction matters when he passes Vantage with Kevin: the Columbia there lies still behind Wanapum Dam, spread into a green lake. Looking north, Ben points toward the country of his childhood, while Kevin answers that those were the good times. The exchange places Rock Island in a landscape remembered through both affection and environmental change.

The orchard and its working landscape

Ben’s parents planted their apple trees on the Columbia’s east bank. Lombardy poplars sheltered the orchard, whose orderly rows descended toward the river among irrigation ditches, quack grass, and props bracing fruit-laden branches. Its plantings included thirteen acres of Golden Delicious, two acres of Winesaps, two of Rome Beauties, and eight acres of cherries and apricots. The farm also contained picker shanties, a shed for making boxes and packing apples, a hay-filled barn, a horse stable, a chicken house, an outhouse, an icehouse, and a small-well pump house. The farmhouse stood on a knoll among elms and willows, with sage-scented air and a view west toward hills bronzed by the setting sun.

This was not simply scenery surrounding Ben’s childhood; it was a workplace that ordered it. He made apple boxes from pine shook, weeded the kitchen garden, split cordwood, and milked cows twice daily. In spring he helped his father and Aidan set out pollinating hives, and when weeds clogged the sluice gates, the brothers cleaned the irrigation ditches by hand. The work continued through the growing year: planting young trees, disking between rows, spreading and strapping branches, thinning fruit, and propping limbs against the weight of the apples. The orchard’s beauty and its labor are inseparable in the account of Rock Island.

School and the rural community

The school on Rock Island Road stood on a knoll above the river, half a mile downstream from the Fisk orchards and near the Palisades junction. Fifteen children attended its single stone-walled room. Apple cordwood heated the building; local orchardists kept the woodshed supplied, and older students fed the stove through winter. A string of electric lights enabled the children to work at their desks and consult maps and primers. The tidy room held the smells of wood smoke, ink, and wet wool.

Ruth Dietrich, who lived with an elderly couple in a rented room, taught the children. Her lessons ranged well beyond the immediate farming country: she read aloud from novels, recited poetry, and spoke about history, agriculture, and distant cultures. When a student announced that Rock Island Dam had been completed, she recited “Ozymandias” and lectured on hubris. The episode brings the local transformation of the river into the schoolroom, where a dam’s completion becomes an occasion to consider human ambition and its consequences.

Homecoming and change

During the return journey, Ben tells a girl that he was born near Rock Island and is going home; she associates the destination with its apple orchards. His brief confirmation connects the present trip to the fuller memories of the family farm. Yet the place he approaches is not held outside time: the dammed river differs from the one he recalls, even as the orchard, its seasonal work, and the school preserve a vivid account of the world that formed him. Rock Island’s significance lies in that double image—as home in Ben’s memory and as a region reshaped by the dams.