Recently I posted a picture of the sauna fire burning hot and mentioned Sam McGee. For those who don’t know, Sam McGee was the sad character from Tennessee who could not take the cold of the Yukon in the poem by Robert Service: The Cremation of Sam McGee. His last wish was to be cremated, a task his friend dutifully tried to complete. The ending had the narrator peeking into the make-do crematorium in the boiler of the derelict ship stuck in the ice on Lake Lebarge and finding his late friend as warm as could be and calling out to shut the door.
Whenever it is extremely cold out, as it has been recently, I think of this poem and the warming power of a hot fire. I love it when the mercury dips below zero. There is something invigorating about having your snot freeze when you breath hard or having sweat icicles dangling off of your brow. I love cross-country skiing in the dark, in the cold, when two hats and two pairs of gloves are needed. One false move and the night might end like “To Build a Fire” by Jack London, another favorite read from Middle school—when I would dream about all of the great explorers who ventured into the frozen lands.
I remember my senior year of high school when Cayuga Lake last froze over. That was a cold year. We did a lot of cross-country ski races that year. With our skimpy race suits and tiny boots we had no protection other than the fire in our hearts to keep us from freezing to death. During the Canadian Ski Marathon that year it was minus 40 at the 8 a.m. start. Celsius and Fahrenheit. If you blinked too long your eyes would literally freeze shut. Old lady volunteers would slap our cheeks at checkpoints to make sure we didn’t have frostbite (and we still wore our skimpy suits.) By the end of that year my parents had moved to the heart of the lower Adirondacks. Our house, in the Black River valley, was often the coldest spot in the lower 48. It was minus 25°F for days on end. Thunder would boom from the river each night as the ice expanded. The ice was several feet thick; I have no idea how the fish survived. I loved to be out in that: skating, skiing, or snowshoeing. It was the cold of a Jack London Story. Your spit would literally freeze in mid air and hit the ground with a crackle.
I had a hot sauna to crawl into after our ski races during that cold winter in high school but not in the years after. When I moved back to the area after college, I went back to that sauna at Podunk weekly until I could build my own and have kept up the ritual ever since. On these freezing nights it is never too cold for a sauna; in fact I relish those times when you can experience the 200° (or more) difference as you go from the hot room to the night air. Your feet freeze to the ground and your hair forms punky icicles.
There’s no need to wait until you are cremated to be truly warm; Poor Sam McGee, if only he had a sauna!
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