Sauna

The Finns attach to the ritual of sauna the same attention to detail that the Japanese attach to the ritual of tea ceremony, only sauna frequently involves beer and jumping naked into lakes and swapping tales with the guys or, I imagine, with the gals. In summertime Finland is a land of the midnight sun. What they don’t mention is that in wintertime Finland is a land of the noon no-sun. By comparison winter in New York or Boston or even Chicago is a frolic. If the Finns hadn’t invented sauna they would have all killed themselves long ago.

I had the exceptional good fortune to get a lesson from Ossi and Ucca, a pair of sauna black belts, on the shore of a lake the other evening after Ucca let me drive his tractor around for a while because I happen to be a guy and he didn’t have a motorcycle handy. It turns out that sauna construction is a sacred art of many essentials.

For starters you need the right kind of rocks, ones that can be repeatedly heated to the temperature of Hades itself and then doused with ladles full of ice water without cracking or fracturing.

The seating gallery needs to be so constructed that all of one’s body parts including toes are above the level of the glowing rocks, assuring uniform roasting of the meat. As the needle approached 80 degrees Celsius I asked my perspiration-clad pals what was the hottest they could endure. After Ossi told me that he had once sat in a 110-degree sauna I mentioned to him that water boils at 100 degrees on the centigrade scale. He smiled and nodded.

The sauna builder needs to provide for proper fresh air circulation, and this is accomplished by inserting a teeny vent low down on the door and a teeny crack up alongside the chimney. Teeny is the operative word here lest the convection effect suck your eyebrows out into the open air.

Non-essential nice-to-haves include birch switches for stimulating your friends’ circulation, tanks of hot and cool water for rinsing, and a window providing a view down to the lake.

By far the most critical aspect of sauna construction, and the first one Ossi mentioned, is the selection of the right kind of wood for the benches upon which you lower those tender parts of your anatomy where the sun seldom shines. You want a nice loose-grained type of wood, one that does not readily conduct heat, because tight-grained highly conductive woods apparently account for a good deal of cranial ceiling destruction and unwanted noise.

When I mentioned that I was feeling very hot, Ossi and Ucca said, “Good. Now you are warming up. Soon you will sweat.” When the sweat started dripping off my nose, they said, “Soon you will turn red and then we will swim.”

Having toed that lake water earlier I doubted very much that I would swim but in the event I jumped right in and then we somehow found our voices pitched from bass to soprano.

And then we did it all again.

The whole adventure was the product of another faithful chain of Christmas letter exchanges, this one dating back to 1969 — the year Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon — when Lori spent the summer living in Helsinki with a family whose same-age daughter is named Sari. Some years later Sari married Ossi. Lucky for me.

Sauna

Old friends