365 True Things: 67/Sauna

When I was fifteen, I spent a month visiting a schoolmate in Finland. She lived with her parents and two sisters in Helsinki, where we spent most of the month, but we also ventured out into the countryside to visit her grandparents, who had a farmstead on a small lake. I'm looking at a map, and various place-names look familiar to me—Savonlinna, Lahti, Kouvola, Kuopio, Häämenlinna—so I can't tell you now just where they lived. All I remember is a beautiful big red farmhouse and . . . the sauna.






Mostly,
the sauna.





I'd never experienced a sauna before, and this was the real deal: wood-fired, in a small building right on the lake, with a long, narrow dock by which to access the water. It looked very much like the picture here, though this isn't it. (The dock, for one thing was longer. At least in my memory.)

My friend, Raili, and I would regularly fire up the sauna—it was wood-burning, not electric like the ones in town. Once it was hot—80–110 °C (175–230 °F)—you'd toss water on the rocks atop the kiuas, the special sauna stove, to produce wet steam (which has its own word in Finnish, löyly—and by "own word," I mean it means only the wet steam produced in the sauna, not just wet steam in general). In the photo here, the bucket holds the water that you'd toss on the kiuas with the wooden ladle. And then there was the vasta, a bundle of dried birch twigs that we'd slap ourselves and each other with. It would get wet and supple, and it was a stimulating treat for the skin. (Really!)

But the best part was, when you got so hot you couldn't stand it anymore, bursting out the door and running down the dock full tilt to execute a long dive at the last possible moment into the cold, cold lake. Then turning around and swimming back as fast as possible, because—I mentioned cold, right?

And then, back into the sauna.

Over and over again.

A naked experience like no other.

(I did mention the naked part?)

A friend today was talking about a local hot springs establishment where you progress from the ice-cold pool to a medium-cold pool to a warm one, and around and around. That reminded me of that glorious sauna.

One of the very few phrases I ever learned in Finnish was this: Sauna oli íhana—The sauna was wonderful—which I said to Raili's grandparents after my first encounter with this delicious tradition. Their blue eyes crinkled in pleasure. They knew exactly what I meant, even if my pronunciation was lousy.