The door hung crooked, the crescent moon cutout winked like a conspirator. Some prankster carved the phrase, “TEMPORAL EXPRESS—NO TICKET, NO REFUND” on the door jamb. Eli grinned, tugged the handle, and felt the familiar rush, that stomach-drop you get at the top of a roller coaster and the scent of cold iron and pine sap. The interior darkened to a gold-black spiral and the world fell away. As he stepped out, he found himself in the middle of chaos. Drums hammered, Union troops yelling, boots thundered past, and a shell screamed overhead. The forest was gone. So was his century.
The Call to Arms (Kansas, Autumn 1861)
“Company A, Eighth Kansas! ” the officer called. “Name?”
“John Lloyd Powell.” The voice was steady, mountain-quiet though no mountain rose around them. Mid-twenties, square-shouldered, with hands built for an ax handle more than a trigger. Driven by deep conviction and a sense of duty to preserve the Union, Powell was among the first to volunteer. He had come not for glory but conviction, the quiet kind that believed a nation’s wounds could still be bound if good men stepped forward.
“Can you read and write, Mr. Powell?”
“Yes, sir.” without boast.
A woman stood behind him. His wife Elmina stood behind him, but she did not cry. Not here. A small boy held to her skirt and studied the world with owlish disapproval not understanding why his father must leave.
When John lifted his hand to take the enlistment paper, something tugged across time. A phrase formed in Eli’s mind, not spoken but understood: Some debts you pay with your feet before you ever fire a shot.
A brass infantry button rolled off the table and clicked against Eli’s boot. He bent, picked it up, and felt warmth in the metal.
The outhouse door stood inexplicably by a stack of crates, moon cutout glowing faintly under the Kansas sun. Eli took one last look at John and Elmina, their future crowding close like weather, and stepped through the outhouse door.
The Long Road West (1896)
Days blurred in heat and wind; nights shrank to the flicker of campfires and the soft cough of oxen in the dark. Rain turned the prairie to glue, sun baked it to iron, and still they pressed on. When the land began to lift and the air thinned, sage gave way to pine, and distant peaks rose like blue promises. By the time the twin Spanish Peaks filled the sky, the Powells were no longer travelers, but settlers creating a new beginning at the edge of Raspberry Mountains.
Eli stood upright beneath a pine at the trail’s bend, one hand on his pack strap, the other shading his eyes. The path wound between spruce like a slow breath. A blue jay scolded him for existing out of context.
“There,” John told Elmina, pointing with his riding whip. “Water for a garden. Timber for a home. I want the children sleeping under a roof before snow makes a fool of us.”
“You do your part, John Powell,” Elmina said without looking, “and snow can do as it pleases.”
They camped by a creek that would one day flow off the stern of cabin decks. After supper John sat on a stump. “I don’t want war to be the most important thing I’ve done,” he said to the night and whoever else might be listening. “I’ll build something that stays.” The ground seemed to agree.
Out of sight of the family, the outhouse shimmered into being and the weathered boards caught stars like fish. Eli touched the brass button in his pocket and stepped into the hum.
Before Pinehaven Had a Name (1905)
“Homestead Act says you stay on it, raise a roof, turn the dirt, and keep at it five years. Prove it up right, and Uncle Sam calls it yours.” the surveyor muttered. “I can show proof,” John said.
They climbed a knoll where you could see everything that wasn’t yet named. He saw lines of darker trees where a road might someday run, a sweep of meadow that would host cabins, a pavilion, and a silver seam of water knitting all to the mountain. “Here,” John decided. “We’ll put the cabin here.”
The first stake thudded. The sound was part heartbeat, part drumroll, part gavel. The mountains took note and the Powells built as though the land were watching. Logs were chosen for straightness with chinking was packed tight against the always punctual winter. The door was built first as a declaration that welcome was the plan even before the roof had its say.
At midday Elmina appeared with bread, meat, and sunlight-colored flour on her cheek. The boys lifted, carried, argued, and learned. John, at a crate-table, dipped a pen and signed the documents the government would later honor and the mountains were honoring now.
Eli felt a tremor in his pocket, brass on brass. He pulled out the infantry button. Another round thing rested against it now: a copper coin stamped 1905. He didn’t remember picking it up but looked at the outhouse leaned behind the new cabin like an inside joke that refused to explain itself. Eli stepped through the door, carrying the smell of sawdust and ink into the dark that hummed like a single tuning fork.
A Last Fire (La Veta, 1920)
“Charles,” John said. His son moved closer, a grown man, who had watched his father step into a line of young men whose names he could still recite by moonlight. “I’ll be going soon.” John smiled the way men do when they’re talking to fear and know they’re the larger animal. “The land must rest before it grows again. Promise me you won’t sell it to anyone who takes more than they give.”
“I promise,” Charles said, the words heavy as a gate that would swing many times.
Elmina put her hand over John’s. “Hush now. Rest.”
He obeyed, then opened his eyes again looking to the doorway as if the mountains had stepped inside. Eli stood partly in shadow near the jamb, seen for the first time. John didn’t startle. He tilted his head, studying the stranger’s clothes and the years behind his eyes. “Don’t reckon I called you in,” he said softly. “No, sir,” Eli answered, stepping closer to the fire’s reach. “Just passing through.”
John’s mouth tucked into the ghost of a smile. “Then pass through gentle. The land remembers every footprint.” “It still does,” Eli said. “Your creek sings. Your meadow holds swings. Your door,” He glanced at the cabin’s frame. “—it’s still a welcome.”
John said like a man weighing lumber. “Then maybe I did my part.” He watched the flame lick the log. “You got people here?”
“Yes,” Eli said. “Turns out my great granddad may have bought fence posts from a Powell.” He nodded toward the tin with keepsakes. “Things…connect.” John’s eyes warmed. “Good fences make neighbors because neighbors make good fences.” He took a breath that caught and held. “Tell ’em…tell ’em I was no saint. Just a man who wanted peace to be the most important thing he’d done.” “I’ll tell them,” Eli promised.
The fire snapped. Elmina looked up, half aware of one more presence and not troubled by it. John’s expression softened, like a man recognizing the horizon he’s been walking toward all his life. “Time’s a curious river,” he murmured. “But it all runs one way in the Lord’s hand.”
“Yes, sir,” Eli said. John closed his eyes. The room grew quiet in that way rooms do when they realize they’re about to become a memory. After a while, the blanket seemed to exhale; Elmina pressed her cheek to John’s hand. Charles stood, fencepost straight.
Eli stepped back into the doorway, eyes stinging, and the moon-cutout grin of the outhouse door glimmered beside the cabin like a ridiculous and holy invitation. He went through.
Paper and Timber (Walsenburg, 1922–1948)
In 1948 Charles Powell would sell the land to J. C. Vories for $1,500. and $200 down. Remainder in installments; profits from future timber to be shared. The names felt like stepping-stones across a stream: you go where they are even if your feet had hoped for a different path. Time folded its papers, satisfied for now. The outhouse door leaned against a stacked-wood wall, moon cutout dusty with sawdust. Eli stepped through the hum toward home.
Pinehaven Now
“Morning, Eli! ” called Marcy from two cabins down, pine needles in her hair and a clipboard gleaming with the serenity of someone who loves checklists. “You’re on branch-drag and donut quality control”, she said. “Half-qualified,” Eli said with a grin.
As he lifted a bundle of slash and felt the brass button in his pocket pressing a circle of memory into his thigh. He reached into his pocket and pulled it out with a 1905 coin sparkled beside it. A teenager pushing a wheelbarrow nodded saying, “What’s that? ” “Proof time talks,” Eli said, tucking them away again. Eli’s quiet thought was this: What we inherit isn’t just acreage. It’s an argument about what land is for.
Footsteps crunched. “You Eli Turner? ” asked a man with a face that looked familiar in the way old photographs do once you’ve met their descendants. “Dick Jameson. My granddad mentioned a Charles Powell. We’re clearing a storage unit over by Yellow Pine Ranch and found a ledger marked ‘Powell’ and a receipt: two cords pine to E. Turner for fence posts. Paid in full” Eli laughed. “You’re kidding.” “Not even a little,” Jameson said. “If it’s your folks, it’s yours. Even if it isn’t, it probably still is. That’s how this valley works.”
At lunch, Eli told neighbors the story of a Civil War button that rolled like a decision, a wagon the color of dust and hope, a cabin raised with a door hung first because welcome mattered more than weatherproofing, and papers that tried to balance a checkbook with a mountain.
“And now we’re here. We inherit not just land but intention, a way of belonging to a place that belonged to someone’s courage before it belonged to anyone’s money.” Silence settled, the good kind. Someone clapped, and lunch flowed back into gossip and logistics.
That afternoon Eli walked to the edge of the clearing. He shut his eyes. “You still here, John? ” he murmured. Wind lifted across the meadow. It was the companionable kind that puts a hand on your shoulder and says you’re enough for today. “We’re trying to do right by you,” Eli said to the trees and to the memory of a man who wanted peace to be the most important thing he’d done.
The outhouse at the treeline, the legitimate one this time, looked back with its crescent grin. He didn’t open it. Some days you don’t need a miracle to tell you what time it is.
It was now. It was Pinehaven. A community with pine pitch in its hair and cinnamon on its breath.
Epilogue: The Ledger and the Creek
“Guess your folks were here earlier than you knew,” Jameson said. “Looks like we owed the fence and the fence held,” Eli said. They made a copy and left the original with Jameson’s family; it felt like the right kind of fence. The ones that keep things in and keeps things neighbors.
Evening settled over the valley, gold wicking into blue. Eli walked back along the curving road, the brass button and 1905 coin riding in his pocket with the copy of the receipt. He didn’t know the physics of it, but he knew the meaning: sometimes time gives back what it owes, interest paid in neighbors.
On his porch he looked toward the not-entirely-innocent outhouse. He lifted a hand in thanks to a veteran who wanted peace to be his legacy, to a family who kept a promise long enough for the valley to keep them, and to a cabin community now standing on their shoulders. “Some dreams don’t die,” Eli said to the air that always heard him. “They just wait for the right generation to remember.”
END
* Authors Note: Time-slip fiction, as used in the Cabin in the Pines blog, is a form of historical storytelling in which a modern character, Eli Turner, travels between eras through an old mountain outhouse that serves as a portal in time. Each journey uncovers the people, geology, and folklore that have shaped the Cuchara Valley across the centuries.
These stories are distinct from the blog’s fact-based historical pieces by their titles, which begin with the words “The Outhouse at the …” Though fictional in form, each tale is rooted in authentic history — blending real people, places, and events with creative imagination to bring the valley’s past vividly to life.
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