The Wells Ravine Time Machine

Six months after my dad died, Mr. Wells made an announcement to the town council: he planned to sell his ravine for $15,000 to a man who wanted to create a reservoir. This posed a problem, because I was still looking for the time machine in the tunnels that led off from the ravine. My best friend Freddie and I made a pact: we would stop the dam, if we couldn’t find the time machine first.

Mr. Wells lived in a big house perched at the edge of the ravine, a deep gorge carved in the rock by the river as it ran from the mountain springs through the hills and plains to the south. We lived just downstream of Mr. Wells, in a wooded hamlet overlooking the sparkling valley. Freddie and I considered the ravine very much our own, and we spent each summer scrambling over boulders and fishing and swimming in the river. Just past Mr. Wells’ house, where the slopes became too steep to climb, there was a narrow opening in the stone that led into a cave system within the mountains, where the time machine was supposed to be hidden.

My dad loved all kinds of stories, but time travel was his favorite. He read me all the classics, but he also loved to make up stories of his own. Every night he would sit in the rocking chair by my bed, curly hair falling over his horn-rimmed glasses, his voice bubbling with excitement as his words painted pictures of worlds I could only imagine. His best story, though, took place very close to home.

“There’s a time machine hidden in the mountains, you know,” he said one night, leaning forward and lowering his voice to a pitch of secrecy. “I met the pilot one time, when I was a kid. She was a young woman with hair the color of a harvest moon, and she told me about her travels. She had been to the future and far, far into the past, back when there were dinosaurs, like in the Ray Bradbury story I read you.”

My eyes widened. “The one where they change the future by stepping on the butterfly?”

“Exactly,” my dad said. “Only she was very, very careful to leave everything the same. In fact, she was tired of travel and told me she wanted to stay here. I never knew where she went, but she said she left her machine in the tunnels beneath the mountain. Since she’s already seen the future, she told me, she knows the right person will find it.”

I thought it was just another story, until after he died. I was sifting through the reams of paper stacked on Dad’s desk when I uncovered a map of the tunnels, marked with a golden circle where the time machine was supposed to be. Freddie and I tried to follow the map. We would tie string to a nail we hammered in at the opening and search through the tunnels, but no matter how far we roamed, we never found the center.

One rainy day in June, I was sorting through Dad’s trunk when I came across a small black notebook nestled among old papers, its cover marked with a golden circle. The map inside showed a different entrance to the caves, on the far side of the ravine. The map had a long route charted out before it reached the entrance, a dotted line moving south through the hills and plains before turning back toward home. I puzzled it over in bed that night, trying to make sense of Dad’s instructions, and out of the corner of my eye I could have sworn I saw the rocking chair move with the thrill of adventure.

The next day, Freddie and I met at dawn, lunches packed and compasses ready. In addition to stories, Dad had loved scavenger hunts and puzzles, so I wasn’t surprised he was sending us on a journey. As we walked, I wondered what I would do when we found the machine. I knew from the stories my dad had read me that time travel was complicated; it wasn’t as easy as just going to the past and changing things. But I hoped that maybe, just maybe, I could go back and hug him one more time, and have him kiss my forehead before bed, as light as a butterfly’s wings.

The map led us along the river, past the southern border of town. We crossed under a great trestle bridge, trains trundling overhead. As we moved south the cliffs shrank and softened, and above us there were rolling green hills, small farms and orchards and gardens. Houses nestled in the curves of the hills and soft grasses stretched down to the edge of the river, where children were casting fishing rods into the water and skipping pebbles. We had never been this far south before, but we recognized the names on the gates of some of the small farms; their vegetables and fruits showed up on the shelves of our stores, juicy and ripe as the land they came from.

We walked for several miles before the river flattened to a wide blue stretch of still water. We followed the edge of the water until we were stopped short by a plunging concrete wall below us. Here, miles south of the town, the river had already been dammed.

“Is this what he wanted us to see?” Freddie asked, peering over the edge.

I inspected the map and shook my head. “Not yet. The trail goes just a bit longer.”

As we continued, a storm began to weight the sky and we heard a rumble of thunder. Past the concrete wall of the dam, the river slowed to a trickle, flanked by stretches of white sand. Here, the green land was fading to brown; orchards had shriveled, and the farms had closed up their doors. We couldn’t tell where the water had gone, but it wasn’t here. Perhaps to the city, which loomed to the south, all yellow smog and skyscrapers beneath the darkening sky.

“So this is what will happen to us, and all the people below us,” I said, gazing into the distance. We had reached the end of the trail, where we were meant to turn around and head north again.

“What are we supposed to do now?” Freddie asked. “Find the time machine and change the future?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said, “but I want to find out.”

We stepped over the trickling water as heavy drops began to fall from the sky, moistening the dusty earth. It took us a while to return to our section of the river, but as we approached, the walls of the ravine rising up around us and the smell of moss and mud in the air, we were more grateful than ever for what we had. As we ascended the rocky slope, we spotted the gap in the rock that was marked on Dad’s map. We drove another stake, tied the string, lit our lanterns, and set off into the dark.

We walked for what felt like miles, the caves echoing around us; it was as if we could hear the whole history of the mountain, could sense the ancient forces that had shaped the rock. We passed around a bend and into a narrow stretch of tunnel, inching along between walls of wet stone, until finally the space opened into a cavern. In the center, on a flat slab of rock, was a small golden box. We had reached the circle marked on the map.

Freddie laughed. “Well, I was expecting something more like a car, but what do I know about time travel?”

“It’s smaller than I imagined,” I said, “But small can be mighty too. Let’s see what we’re working with.” But when I opened the gilded lid, there were no gears or wires – just a folded, typed letter. I sat down on the rock and began to read aloud.

“Dear Lia,

I’ve seen the future, so I already know what will happen, if the river is dammed. It’ll be nice, for a while, when people can go swimming in the reservoir – if you can afford a ticket, that is. But the river as you know it, where you grew up scrambling and fishing among the rocks, will never be the same. It will slow to a trickle of water; the fields will dry up, and soon the lush orchards will start to die. The buyer won’t stop there. With the proceeds from the water he sells, he’ll buy more and more land, and drill the earth for oil, and eventually it will all be his.”

I turned the note over.

“I said I’ve seen the future, but now, so have you. Sometimes, to travel through time, all you have to do is travel through space. I wanted to show you myself, before I got too sick. But I’m glad we could have an adventure together, one last time. Remember: you can always change the future from the present.

Love, Dad.”

My eyes welled with tears as Freddie wrapped his arms around me.

“Wait a second,” he pointed out, looking over the note. “What are these numbers at the bottom?”

Overwhelmed by Dad’s words, I hadn’t noticed them at first. But below the text, he had written a stretch of random digits. I puzzled over them for a moment until I realized the same numbers had been printed on some checks in Dad’s files

“It’s a bank account number!”

Freddie and I didn’t know the first thing about bank accounts. But I knew Mrs. Fletcher, the bank teller, and I figured I could ask her. The storm had lifted by the time we left the cave and made our way to town under a clear sky banded by a rainbow. It was like Dad was saying hello, from wherever he was.

When I entered the bank, Mrs. Fletcher beamed widely. “Well, well. There she is,” she said. She rifled through papers behind the counter before handing over a printed summary of the account my dad had left in my name. There it was: $20,000.

“I was wondering how long it would take you,” she said, winking.

I smiled back. “I had a journey to go on first.”

***

Like a lot of people who are just trying to make a buck, Mr. Wells hadn’t done a whole lot of time traveling of his own. And like a lot of people who live upstream, he didn’t spend a lot of time looking down. He had no idea what would happen if he dammed the ravine, but when I offered him a whole $5,000 more than the other buyer had, he agreed in a second.

After I bought the ravine, I settled down to go through all of Dad’s papers. I was amazed at the wealth of stories he had left behind, stacks on stacks of black notebooks, and I read them aloud to Freddie as we rambled through the ravine, vowing to publish them one day – it was something he had never gotten around to.

One day we were down by the stream when we spotted an elderly woman we didn’t recognize, coming toward us from the caves. She held a walking stick and binoculars, and her brilliant orange hair formed a halo around her face. She didn’t notice us at first, absorbed in her bird-watching, but when she glimpsed us she stopped in her tracks.

“Lia Maxwell?” she called out, hurrying toward us.

“How do you know my name?” I asked her.

“Oh, I come around here sometimes,” she said. “I only met your father once, but I’m a big fan of his books.”

Freddie and I looked at each other, perplexed. Books?

“Come, walk with me,” she said, laughing and linking her arm through mine. “I think we have a lot to discuss.”