In My Hands

We’re on a school bus returning from the state cross-country skiing championships. The bus heater and my finger are both broken. It’s past my bedtime, and I’m shivering intermittently.

Ben sits scrunched in the corner of the rearmost seat, half cocooned in his sleeping bag, gazing out into the darkness through the frosted-over glass of the bus window. I think we’re the only two still awake.

Huddled up across the aisle from him, I shiver again and snuggle deeper into my own sleeping bag. In this moment I’m aching slightly, both on account of my broken finger and because this perfect trip will soon be over. The three days I spent at the races with my closest friends have been so precious that, as we near home, I’m a bit melancholy.

I think this is the first time I can remember missing people while they sit right beside me.

Ben holds in his hand a bright round navel orange. He’s peeling it slowly and deliberately; his fingertips are working patiently between the smooth, porous skin and the fruit. In a slow spiral, the peel comes away unbroken, like a little pelt. My nose now tickles faintly with the citrusy mist the orange has spurted out.

Ben is absorbed in the process.

“Why don’t you just haggle the skin off and be done with it?” I ask him. My voice sounds belligerently loud in the dark.

Ben shrugs. The moon has come up over the Chugach Range now, and the frost covering the window is backlit by its soft blue light. “Every time I eat an orange,” he begins, “I make sure to peel it in one piece. I think anybody who doesn’t have the calm and focus to do such a thing is too tense or busy.”

Along with this wisdom, he offers me a section of orange.

In "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," Robert M. Prisig suggests “the real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called ‘yourself’.” He’s referring to the serene concentration he finds while keeping his motorcycle in good repair. For my friend Ben, this inner peace of mind can be found in the careful motions of separating an orange from its peel. I find it in writing.

For the first five years of my life, my family and I lived in a fur-trapping cabin my father built, about a day’s hike north of the village of Talkeetna. The long winter nights were filled with my father’s reading to me by the kerosene lantern the stories of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. As I drifted off to sleep beneath the thick wool blankets, his voice would fade into the quiet rush of the creek muffled under the snow. The fast pace of my current life in town sometimes makes me miss the peace I knew at the cabin. Writing is my lifeline back to that tranquility.

When I feel like I’m suffocating under the responsibilities of home or school, I pick up a pen and escape. I leave behind whatever complications are dragging me down and flee to a memory of a show with my band, or of snowboarding in the Talkeetnas, returning each night to syrupy-thick Tang by lantern light at our snow cave campsite. The memories of my triumphs and misadventures often make me laugh; and the focused, disciplined process of memorializing them in written words is soothing and rewarding.

Without that sanctuary, that chance for respite, I’d be like a hamster condemned to run on my little wheel forever, perpetually absorbed in the present, never able to step away from the race that’s exhausting me. As I sit scribbling away, singularly concentrated upon my purpose, refining my thoughts to ever-deeper clarity, there’s no room in my consciousness for worries or regrets or all the complications plaguing my busy life. Writing is my peace, my safe place, my refuge.

It’s my orange, Ben. I’m peeling it right now.