This week Bill takes us, near and afar, for a Sauna 101 primer
There’s that multi-sensory image of taking the ladle in hand, scooping water from the cedar sauna bucket. The light is usually subdued within its wooden walls, there’s a welcoming smell.The water cracks and hisses as it hits the piled rocks that look like a jigsaw puzzle. You are showered slowly by the rising heat that wraps around you, finally releasing that slippery sweat from within. You relax with its soothing embrace.
Sauna statistics There are about 3.5 million saunas in Finland, a Nordic country with a population of 5,619,881. Almost two-thirds, per capita, that is to be expected. Almost 90 per cent of Finns go to a sauna once a week. Traditionally, Saturdays were sauna days, but today Finns go to the sauna any day of the week — about 200 million times a year in total.
In a sauna, people cleanse their bodies and minds and embrace a sense of inner peace. It is actually a state of mind rather than a ritual of cleanliness. Who would know all about this?Mikkel Aaland authored the book Perfect Sweat, which really started the more contemporary journey of exploring of saunas, transcending the warmth of the experience to delve deeper into the unique places and individuals that define the sweat-bathing culture. He was located in San Francisco.
“The sauna /sweat bath combines the physical, the spiritual, and the mental under one roof and I can’t think of another human activity that does that. Perhaps eating… Or sports… Anyway, I’ve been on many adventures in my life, but the sauna/sweat is a place where everything comes together. The International Sauna Association is an association of national and other sauna societies, organizations and private people. It was founded in 1958. I heard back from its President, Risto Elomaa about an innovative program – Sauna Aid.
A 2005 book ‘Sweating with Finns: Sauna Stories from North America, and one of the authors, Jorma Halonen, resides in Thunder Bay. He explained the evolution of the book. At the time Jorma was the chair of the Thunder Bay Finnish Canadian Historical Society. “We decided to publish the best ones in a book with translations of the winning ones into the other language. I translated the winning Finnish one into English and Raija translated the English one into Finnish.Local research Erin Alexiuk is a University of Waterloo PhD candidate in the field of autoethnography a qualitative research methodology that centres the self in social and cultural analysis.
"Today, saunas are one of the most recognizable cultural symbols of Finland and their importance to rural Finnish-Canadian communities cannot be understated. “It is a way to connect with the land; an embodied, spiritual practice; a routine bathing practice; a doorway to cultural roots and institutions; a space for cultivating inner wholeness; and a central figure in our family history.”
Bill's sauna story My sauna story relates to a past November canoe trip we had summitted the Ishpatina Ridge, Ontario’s highest peak, crossing the upper Sturgeon River, accessing it by Scarecrow Lake. But it was not without some peril, finding ourselves very cold and very wet from the onslaught of sleet, and approaching that level of mild hyperthermia, late in the afternoon. It was one of those times when shelter and warmth were becoming immediate priorities.
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