If you look Podunk up in the dictionary, it will tell you it is a hypothetical or insignificant town.
The folks who live there think otherwise. In reality, Podunk is a place name on the map, the location just a short ski south of Trumansburg, New York, where I grew up. The smattering of residents, will all tell you that Podunk is very real and very significant.
In the 1960s, Ozzie Heila settled there with his family on an old farmstead established by an even older Finn who first built his sauna (above) before the house in the 1930s. It is also where I learned all the important things in life. In the 1970s I spent countless winter hours there at the ski center that Ozzie established, becoming a damn good Nordic skier and developing a life-long passion for the sport.
In the summers, I explored the creek with his son my good friend Daniel and learned the value of immersing one’s self in nature. Daniel’s mother, Ethel, was my art teacher in middle school; she helped me become the artist I am today, and we still have wonderful conversations about color theory and art composition. The sauna was the heart of the complex of dated farm buildings; there I learned to channel my need to experience extremes into something healthy and life affirming. We loved going from the hot to the cold.
Jumping in the creek in the dead of winter after a searing round in the sauna, we felt more alive than ever. That feeling has never died; each cold plunge I take during sauna takes me back to that creek.
Today, Daniel and his family were back in the area and we went to Podunk to visit the old homestead once again. This time we took our Finnish Blue mobile sauna and parked it next to the ramshackle old sauna, which is now defunct and awaiting a rebirth. Of course, many things have changed in that memorable place. The trees have grown huge or have died; the old purple Lilac, with the rusty sauna bell hanging from its branches, is gone and the brush has been cleared away from the old sauna, revealing the sagging bones of the century-old structure. But the building itself is as recognizable as the last day I took a sauna there about twenty-five years ago. The inside is a sadder story. It turns out that squirrels like the sauna too, and they have made it their own. In an expression of horror at the mess, the Lämpimämpi stove I welded up for Ozzie in the 90s sits with it’s mouth rusted wide open.
The path through the field to the creek is the same but with a detour to the left towards a new dipping hole: a makeshift stone bathtub—with a strategically placed rock to help keep your butt moored—in the midst of the rushing current. The run down to the creek had an awkward familiarity: running all out before cooling off while maintaining stable footing. Still a challenge. And the sensation! Whoops and hollers of twelve-year-old boys came out of us as we braved the icy April stream.
Real or not, Podunk is the same as it will always be. What are memories but unreal fragments of experience in our minds, ready to be stirred up by whirling waters in a cold stream or by the exhilarating steam of a sauna?
The old next to the new will always appear old, until we make it new again and live our lives to the fullest, with no regrets, in the now, and with dreams, not of memories, but of tomorrows.
