The latest sauna we built is an indoor electric affair. We installed it in a new addition that also holds a hot tub and pool, an enviable combination for a personal home spa. It has an ample window and large 10 kW Harvia Cilindro heater that should make the top bench a real hot spot. I love the view from that bench. Not just any view, but one that takes me back to my childhood.
The property is located on the eastern shoulder of Cayuga Lake, at a point where the land starts to dip dramatically downward to the long snaking shore. The slope is so steep here that you don’t see the lake, only the opposite side a little more than two miles away. Someone unfamiliar with our landscape might not be aware that the longest of the Finger Lakes fills a glacier-carved trough below. While the scene through the window feels close, it is in fact, a long journey away.
The view is of one of my old stomping grounds: Taughannock State Park.
The most pronounced land formation is Rice Hill: the old skiing and sledding hill in Trumansburg [or Ulysses?] that at one time had a rope tow run off an old tractor motor. There’s a warming hut and two shallow ice rinks at the top of the hill where many a hockey game was played. When friends and I were too broke or didn’t have the ambition or means to go to the closest downhill ski area, we would go to Rice Hill and practice our S turns. I also recall many tobogganing adventures; it was the kind of hill where serious injuries marked a good run.
Just to the north is a ten-acre parcel my parents bought in the 1960s with the dream of building a house. My dad designed the home with all the meticulous detail he employed on his large-scale architectural projects. It was a three-story modernist affair with a flat roof and cantilevered balconies that would have commanded a view across the lake precisely to the location of this sauna.
In the early ‘70s, things turned south for my dad: there was a recession, he lost his job, increased his drinking, and the dream of the modernist masterpiece overlooking the lake deflated like a balloon the cat clawed. All we were left with was a model of the house my dad crafted out of mat board, with twigs as stand-ins for trees. Later, after I finished grad school and before my parents had to sell the property as part of a bankruptcy plan, I lived on the lot in a tent and tarp shelter, waiting for my dreams to come to life.
I bring all of this up because of the prevailing association of sauna with memory. So many of my clients, who are typically aging baby boomers like me, say they want a sauna because of the wonderful childhood memories they have of sauna time.
Perhaps their family has Finnish roots, and they experienced summers in Finland, or they had a camp somewhere with a sauna. Like my experiences at Podunk, these childhood memories start to loom larger with age. Memory acts as a filter; the important things are retained and the trivial is set aside.
Landscape acts as a placeholder for memory. Living later in life where I grew up, I constantly encounter places that stir memory. While working on this project, with my past literally visible beyond the window and across the lake, I was constantly reminded of my connection to this magical place in the heart of the Finger Lakes. Sauna is a keystone in all of this.
As with so many saunas I build, I stop work and dream for a moment; what if it was mine? But then, I hand over the sauna to the new owners so they can ponder their own dreams. In this case, the owner will gaze out the window at the immediate surroundings: Land that he grew up on.
What is the view out of your sauna window?
