I’m sitting on a rough wooden bench beside Eero, a large Finnish man, next to a traditional smoke sauna in the middle of an island, in the middle of a river (in which we’ve just swum), in the middle of a forest, in the middle of Finland, which right now feels, blissfully, like the middle of nowhere.
Naked. Vapour steams from our shoulders and thighs while my head appears to have floated free of my neck.
There are, Eero tells me, wolves in this forest as well as elks, the odd lynx and even a bear or two. Although it’s eight in the evening, the day is still bright and birds are singing in the slender birches and towering pines around us.
This is the third time in two hours we’ve emerged from the smoke sauna, bringing with us the scent of burning alder logs, and sunk our heated, sweating bodies into the treacle-coloured river. The contrast in temperature, from the 90°C air that folds about you with each ladle’s splash and hiss over the hot stones, to the 7°C river water, is alarming. Your heart races, your breath catches and your blood comes humming to the surface of your skin. As you sit out the wake of this sensory assault, however, you begin to realise why so many Finns subject themselves to this process. It’s calming and invigorating all at once, or as Eero puts it, “a chance to sit and listen to yourself, your body”.
In Finland the sauna is not just always close geographically, but also philosophically and socially too. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising as the smells and sensations of the sauna are somehow hard-wired into the Finnish psyche; after all, as it is explained, the smoke-sauna was traditionally where children were born, where families gathered and where village gossip was swapped. Even nowadays, day-long business conferences are held naked in the the steam of the sauna.
The idea of a nude board meeting would seem strange elsewhere, but in Finland it somehow seems fitting, a worthy image for the contrasting juxtapositions that make up the Finnish character.
In the Lakeland area Finnish eccentricity often comes to the fore over the brief summer festival period, and no more so than at the wife-carrying festival held in Sonkajarvella every July. Inspired by an infamous local thief who initiated his gang members by making them steal someone else’s wife, what began as a bit of a joke has now become serious sport. At least, as serious as is possible when the main event involves running round an obstacle course with a wife (not necessarily your own) clinging to your back.
Again, it all seems perfectly Finnish: the physical prowess, the sense of history, the bizarreness. In recent years, however, it’s all become a bit more, well, Estonian — the winners of the festival are increasingly from Finland’s neighbour. As our host said, “The Estonians — they have very big men and very small women.” A winning combination, obviously.
On returning to our lodge in the evening, we fired up the cabin’s lakeside wood-burning sauna which we finally entered in the sunset of a Finnish midnight.
We’d only been there for two days but already the sense of escape was complete. Bathing in the lake between bouts in the sauna, it was as though the silence of the location, of the taut, unrippled lake and the dark forest around us, had somehow stretched time to make hours feel like days and our days like weeks. As we watched the lake’s surface cool from red to orange to pink, all thoughts of our departure in the morning dissipated with the fading light. — Â