If you look “Podunk” up in the dictionary, it will tell you that it is a hypothetical or insignificant town. The folks who live there think otherwise. Podunk is actually a place name on the map a short ski south of Trumansburg, New York, where I grew up. Despite having only a smattering of residents, they will all tell you that is very real and very significant.
In the 1960’s Ozzie Heila settled there with this family on an old farmstead established by an even older Finn who first built his sauna (above) before the house in the 1930’s. It is also where I learned of all the important things in life. In the 1970’s I spent countless winter hours there at the ski center that Ozzie established, becoming a become 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. And at the heart of the complex of dated farm buildings was the sauna; 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. Many things have changed but some things are the same. The trees have grown huge or even 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 25 years ago. The inside is a sadder story—it turns out that squirrels like the sauna too and they have made it theirs. As if in a expression of horror at the mess, the Lämpimämpi stove I welded up for Ozzie in the 90’s 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 bathtub in the midst of the rushing current with a strategically placed rock to help keep your butt moored. The run down to the creek had the same awkwardness … trying to run all out before you cooled off but trying to maintain stable footing the same. And the sensation! The whoops and hollers of 12-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 in our minds, ready to be stirred up by whirling waters of a cold stream, or by the hot steam of a sauna? The old next to the new will always appear old, until we make it new again and live our lives in the now, to the fullest, with no regrets, and dreams, not of memories, but of tomorrows.
New sauna and parked it next to the old sauna near the creek.
Sauna is an interesting word. It is both the noun describing the little structures that I spend my days making and the action of how one uses that building. Mostly, I focus on the details of building and let the details of how one uses the Sauna fall to the individual taste of my clients. I don’t adhere to a dogmatic approach; everyone has his or her own experiences and memories to draw from. Different countries have subtle variations: wetter, drier, hotter, timed sessions, birch Vihta, etc. My memories stem from my time at Podunk, in the old Finnish Sauna. I remember the 5 gallon joint-compound buckets for gathering water from the creek, and the various cheap plastic wash tubs, brushes, loofa, and other bathing implements. There was some sort of ladle (which we always called a kipper in some mis-appropriation of Finnish-ness) for pouring water on the rocks. And there would be various soaps and shampoos–some common, some not so common, like the Finnish pine tar soap, which, despite its comparison to the sticky pine tar we would out on our skis, actually feels pretty good.
Podunk
Once the sauna got good and hot we would strip down as unceremoniously as possible and go in. The first round would always be pretty talkative and end with a healthy ladle-full or two of water on the hot rocks until we had to bolt out the door and head to the creek. If someone were annoyingly loud sometimes a good löyly would be timed so as to quiet things down. In the second and third round we might take great pleasure in thrashing each other (gently) with a birch vihta if someone bothered to make one from the birch tree outside the Podunk sauna. The old Finns would make them in the spring out of the fresh soft leaves and keep them in the freezer. Now you can actually buy them from Finland—dried and vacuum packed for a reasonable sum. After softening them in water for twenty minutes they smell just like a fresh birch tree.
The last round in the sauna
would be time to wash: after getting hot again we would take turns on the
little washing bench scrubbing ourselves (or each other) with the loofa or
stiff sauna brushes and some sauna soap. Finally a rinse with some warm water
would wash off all of that dead skin and residue of a week’s hard work and we
would leave the sauna all fresh sand natural smelling. None of us ever had to
wear deodorant or poufy colognes.
pouring water on the rocks
how to have a sauna “bath”
simple beauty of an ice lantern
Sometimes I sauna with friends, sometimes alone. Always it is the same: get hot until sweat just pours out of me, cool off, repeat; scrub my skin, maybe switch my back with the Vihta, wash up, rinse down the sauna. It’s a ritual of sorts but not like the way a ritual in the church is dictated to you. As in church, there are ritual objects that create focus help and direct the actions, but instead of incense and gold, they are plastic and wood. And unlike church, there is no sin in doing it anyway you want to. The brushes, basins, ladle, soap, and vihta are there just to help establish the flow of the sauna experience. To the uninitiated it may seem all strange, but after a few times, it all makes sense. It is just a bath house, after all.
Lately, I have found that the top of my noggin does not have so much insulation from the heat of a good löyly so I have taken to wearing a felt sauna hat, which is sort of like a Shriner’s Fez, which is to say that it makes you feel just a little goofy. But, then again, I wouldn’t want to be accused of taking the sauna ritual too seriously!
