Cecil Books

In the high Oregon Cascades, on the shore of a place called Olallie Lake, about halfway down the trail between Cabin 2 and the Resort Store, there is a roundish rock roughly the size of a garden table and the rock has been split at the center by a small, gnarled, leafless tree from a time no one can now remember. The name of the rock and of the tree together is Cecil Books. 

Cecil Books is a time machine, though only four or five boys are aware of this. They are the passengers, the time travelers. Aside from being a time machine, Cecil Books possesses in his stony memory banks all of the world's available knowledge, along with quite a bit that never was and never will be available. Cecil does not know the difference between facts and fables, but he knows the minds of boys. 

In order to travel in time, one must mount the machine and cling to the trunk of the central tree. Often enough, the ride is rough, for the currents of time are swift and sometimes stormy. Occasionally, Cecil runs out of gas, stranding the boys in the middle of an Indian war or a black hole, and Cecil must be refilled through a hollow root protruding from his base, and the dust of the earth is his fuel.

Cecil is not always by the lake. Cecil is everywhere. The lake, just there between Cabin 2 and the store, is more like his original home, his birthplace, the place where Cecil is most what he is. He is not an idea, not a concept. He is a rock and a tree, and a time machine. 

You can say to Cecil, "Take us to the year 5000 BC", and Cecil will take you there, and chances are that it will be far different than anyone thought it would be. You can say, "Take us to Dodge City", and he will do that, too. He conveys the boys not only through time, but through distance as well--for how else are boys going to get from the high cascades to Dodge City, Kansas in the space of the time they have on hand? 

Cecil Books goes anywhere and everywhere, from the far reaches of the world and time to the far reaches of outer space and beyond, and yet he never moves an inch without boys. And as far as anyone else can see, as far as adults can see, Cecil never moves at all. But that's just as far as they can see. They see the rock, they see the tree, they see the boys clinging to the tree, but they do not see the journey taking place. That's because it all happens in the wink of an eye. It all happens outside the confines of sight and time. 

I would like to see Cecil again someday, and I think I will find him, still, on the shore of that lake. I would like to lay my palm to his adamant flank and touch the barky skin of his mast and gaze from atop the fissured deck to the shore of the water and the blue of the distant deep and the rising of the trees to the crowns of the hills all falling into the sky beyond and beyond. Time is short, and the distance is great, but Cecil, knowing time better than anyone, is always patient. Cecil always waits. Not here. Not there. Everywhere.