Ruth Dietrich

Ruth Dietrich is a teacher in the orchard country whose learning ranges from classical literature and natural history to world religions and agriculture. Her lessons make the small local school a meeting place for an unusually broad world of ideas, and her most consequential intervention is personal: she identifies Ben Givens as a gifted student and urges him to imagine a future beyond orchard work.

Identity and Teaching

Dietrich lives with the Cochrane couple, whose grown children have left them an extra room to rent. At school, she is described as a large, lively woman with glasses on a chain, gray hair pinned tightly to her head, and a cream lace shawl secured with a brooch. She peers over her wire frames at her pupils, then looks down through lenses that swim as she reads aloud. The description preserves her particularity rather than making her learning an abstract trait: her lined, coarse face and the two long hairs on a mole on her chin are part of the vivid portrait.

Her classroom is a single-room schoolhouse on a knoll above the river, where the children study by lights fixed over their desks. Dietrich reads them works including Ivanhoe and Alice in Wonderland, and she is ready to turn a passing occasion into recitation. A breeze off the river calls forth Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind; the varied colors of apples on her desk prompt Hopkins’s Pied Beauty. When a student announces that the Rock Island Dam is complete, she recites Shelley’s Ozymandias and follows it with a lecture on hubris. Poetry, in her teaching, is not kept apart from ordinary events: it is a way to interpret them.

A Wide-Ranging Curriculum

Dietrich’s authority in the classroom comes from the breadth of what she knows. She can discuss Mesopotamian agriculture, Egyptian rulers, Greek scientific thought, Inca religion, Darwin’s travels to the Galapagos, the Boxer Rebellion, the Potala in Lhasa, and Mongol invasions. She also collects Wanapum arrowheads, petrified wood, and opals, linking learning to objects gathered from the world around her. Her recitations range from Frost at Midnight to The Passionate Shepherd to His Love and The Nymphs Reply to the Shepherd.

For Ben, her influence extends beyond the classroom performance of knowledge. She lends him books, and he reads Macbeth, The Canterbury Tales, David Copperfield, The Pickwick Papers, and Heart of Darkness with zeal. Under her instruction he learns the periodic table, basic theorems of geometry, the Latin names Linnaeus assigned to plants and animals, and material on polar exploration, crystals, sedimentary rock, and the propagation of light. The range matters: Dietrich gives a rural pupil access to literary, scientific, and historical subjects without suggesting that any one of them exhausts what he might learn.

Apples as Local Knowledge and Cultural Memory

Dietrich’s knowledge of apples makes her teaching especially at home in the orchard landscape. She gives the fruit’s name as Pyrus malus and connects it to stories of Aphrodite, Adonis, and the transformation of a priest into an apple tree. When students bob for apples in fall, she describes the custom as an act of divination among the Druids. In other lessons, she associates the apple with Apollo and Venus, the discord that leads to the Trojan War, and Bulgarian paintings of the Virgin Mary holding an apple while Jesus rests in her other hand.

She uses apple lore both to enlarge the subject and to make it memorable. A misbehaving student may hear a warning drawn from Chaucer about a rotten apple harming its neighbors; a disagreement between the Gilchrist sisters brings Shakespeare’s comparison of an apple cut in two to the two disputants. When a pupil complains about homework, Dietrich invokes Hercules’s labor to bring back the golden apples of the Hesperides, turning a mythic journey and its dragon into an argument for reading ten pages of Huckleberry Finn. Local fruit becomes a route into mythology, literature, discipline, and humor.

Ben’s Promise and the Question of His Future

Dietrich’s most direct effect on Ben comes when she keeps him after school and tells him he is her brightest hope in twenty-seven years of teaching on the western plains. She considers him a candidate for a good university and urges him toward that possibility, presenting education as an adventure and a test rather than a path he should fear. Her questions press him to consider whether the larger world might be waiting and whether he owes himself the chance to enter it.

Ben answers that his father needs him to work in the apple orchard. Dietrich asks whether he could do that later, but the scene does not show Ben accepting her proposal. He thanks her and goes out to Aidan, who is waiting against the schoolhouse wall in the hard January wind. Her encouragement therefore opens a possibility without resolving the practical claim of family work. Dietrich’s role is that of a teacher who recognizes Ben’s capacity and tries to widen his horizon; the decision remains his, with the orchard still present as an immediate obligation.