Fencerows: Sauna
By John Luthens
I was 10 years old when my mind wrapped itself in the gentle outdoor towel surrounding me. It was bath time on the cusp of a falling summer night in my grandparent’s tarpaper cabin in the far northwestern corner of Wisconsin – the Brule River Valley, to be exact. Through a child’s eyes, the unending whisper of red pines, rivers and logged-over sand barrens felt like a giant’s playground with no end and no beginning. I remember whippoorwills calling like soft-spoken cheerleaders and nighthawks and bats swooping from hidden perches to beckon me into the coming darkness.
Wood smoke drifted from the sauna like a fragrant mist as I stood on the cabin porch and shed my clothes in preparation for the nightly ritual. I was not shy. I’d been potty trained in a two-hole outhouse, and that had pretty much robbed me of any insecurity issues a typical kid might have about his own mortal nakedness. While the cabin itself had running water supplied by a covered pump house – showers and tubs, along with indoor toilets were luxuries that weren’t deemed all that important in this small corner of the world.
I took a deep breath of twilight and pounded across the sandy yard, covering 25 yards of northern freedom in a record time that still stands today in the buck-naked hall of fame. It was exhilarating, but it was only a warm-up exercise before entering the purifying shrine of heat that rose in the barefoot shadows before me.
The sauna rested on the edge of a birch meadow where deer paced tentatively out of the forest to browse in the evening. The siding was peeling and curled from endless years of heat, and a black stovepipe leaned through the roof with mesh wire on top to keep out the chipmunks. It had a look of carefree ease about it, as if it were slowly settling into the clearing to become one with the grass and birch wildlife.
A screen door swung into a dressing room with a carpet-covered bench and a stack of towels; a place where the more civilized members of our clan prepared for their baths in elegant privacy instead of letting it rip across the yard. The walls were tacked with yellowed poster calendars and old beer signs, and hanging neatly by the door was a red ledger filled with rows of faded names and witty observances; a guest registry, if you will.
My grandparents were a single generation removed from their roots in Finland, and perched up and down the back roads of the Brue River Valley were the shacks of neighbors who shared the same ethnic background and had their own saunas. Instead of formal Sunday visits for chicken dinner, regular pilgrimages were conducted in round- robin fashion for fellowship and steam.
Heated games of horseshoes followed up with heated baths; Names, places, and the remembered ring of iron clanking on pegs beneath swaying pines were duly recorded in the sauna’s registry. The sauna was a backwoods repository, and the ledger was a history book of the north, written year by year like the patient growth rings of the pines themselves; scribbled maps of lives come and gone, living and laughing and speaking the old language of Finland on the sauna steps.
The interior of the sauna was separated from the changing room by a heavy door with a polished cedar handle that smelled of steamed wood when I tugged it open. Inside was an iron stove covered with large rocks, and a steel hot water tank piped directly into the wood burner. The tank needed to be filled by hand, but the stove itself never went completely dry. It was stoked in the afternoon to really get it roaring, but even in the morning the remnants of oak and pine logs still popped and crackled, and the water tank which was hot enough to scald skin the night before always stayed pleasantly warm for morning wash-ups.
Two pine benches faced the stove, one above the other, neatly lined with soap containers, shampoos and scrub brushes, along with a tin water dipper and a cold bucket of water for rinsing that was lugged in from the outside pump house. And while the benches were a fine place to store bath essentials, their true purpose was the very essence of the sauna itself.
The dipper was ceremoniously dunked in the bucket and poured on the rocks, steam roaring forth in vapor clouds that sunk deep into the lungs and penetrated the skin pores. One only needed pick a bench and wait for the sauna to perform its ancient magic.
Sitting on the lower bench, the steam and heat were not so overwhelming. It was pleasant for some – sissy’s, I think my grandfather called them, but with jets of steam rising and rocks hissing it was hard to hear. Grandpa spoke in a thick Finnish accent, and he may very well have been saying Sisu, which is a Finnish word with a highly ambiguous and personal translation, meaning different things to everyone, but basically standing for the fact that everyone stakes out their own sauna bench in life, and if the lower bench is where one chooses to make a stand, then so be it. I was still very young, and I didn’t yet understand that the sauna was more than a bath of steam. It was also a place of deep philosophy.
Myself, I sat on the upper bench, but not out of any feeling of moral superiority. My God, I’d run naked to claim it, so it appeared my own personal Sisu was already plummeting down the low road. I perched on the high bench due to the simple fact that I managed to trap an inordinate amount of northwestern Wisconsin’s finest dirt in my daily wanderings.
“More steam, boy,” Grandpa shouted, and I’d joyfully oblige, pouring dipper after dipper on glowing rocks and letting the pages of my Tom Sawyer adventures in the north woods burn from my body:
Mornings I’d slide down the hill to the Brule River and try for a trout. I was still learning the finer arts of the angle so, more often than not, I’d slump back to the cabin beaten and empty handed. But when I did manage to horse one in I’d cradle the cold beast to my body like a newborn baby. I’d refuse to wash it off till sauna time, wearing the slime-covered scent like a proud badge of honor until the last moments of the day.
The country was rife with buried garbage from long-abandoned homesteads. I fancied myself a regular Indiana Jones, and my archaeological treasure hunts yielded ancient bottles and cans and shards of forgotten pottery. None of it came without a cost, and I’d invariably stumble into the sauna looking and reeking like a dump.
Climb a jack pine and the hands become red and sticky with pitch. Climb a few more and the red turns into a fabulous shade of black crimson. Jack pine needles love to nestle in the hair, and when I tried to brush them out with pine tar hands all I managed to do was cement them deeper into my tangled mop.
August ushered in the wild blueberry fields of the sand barrens. I was obliged to show some restraint while filling a small bucket to contribute, but after that it became an all-you-can-eat blueberry buffet. Imagine rolling like a bear in a nest of wood ticks and inhaling blueberries straight from the plant, and you’ll begin to understand that the high steam of the top sauna bench was the only thing saving me from a total eclipse into jack pine savagery.
All the sins of youth were forgiven when sauna time was over. I stood new and fresh in the cooling night and let the northern breeze dry me. Pines rustled and crickets chirped as I aired myself across the clearing and beneath the porch light of the cabin to rustle up some pajamas. I stepped lightly upon the sand so I wouldn’t soil my newly-cleaned soul.
The endless summer night stretched, and the dirt of days and years to come was pleasantly washed into the shadows behind me. I recited a child’s prayer into the coming darkness that the sauna would always stand waiting.
John Luthens is a freelance writer from Grafton, Wisconsin. This story is an excerpt from his upcoming book, Writing Wild: Tales and Trails of an Outdoor Journalist. His first novel, Taconite Creek, is available on Amazon or at www.cablepublishing.com or by contacting the author at Luthens@hotmail.com