Backstory: I took a sauna and Finnished it

Moments later, as my face reddens and my stamina wanes, Danny suggests we leave. But I still have one more test to prove that I have sisu (fortitude) – the cooling-off ritual. Some people simply take a shower after a sauna. Others in the Frost Belt roll in the snow or jump in a benumbing lake. The Savukoskis head for the brook behind the shack.

In the late autumn twilight, Danny, Mike, and I scramble down a stone-step embankment, and peer into the granite pools. (My wife, presciently, decides not to participate in this.) I swear I see the boulders shivering. The plunge is more shocking than I had bargained for. I gasp. It feels like I have fallen over backward in a chair. Down a flight of stairs (I've done that before, too).

But it is also refreshing and invigorating. I've earned my stripes – and lived to tell about it.

As it turns out, almost everyone has a story about their first sauna test. Mike, who is married to Danny's sister Sinikka, recalls feeling some trepidation. When their courtship reached a certain point of seriousness, Sinikka told him he'd have to take a sauna with Sauli and Danny.

"My first thought was, 'Do I have to go naked?' " he says. Finnish-American families often go in the sauna nude, but unlike Finns back home, they generally don't with newcomers. Mike, a 28-year-old teacher, was spared that experience. Yet he still had to cope with being the "new boy in the family." Once he got in the sauna, though, his worries vanished. "You relax," he says.

Fine, but did he pass the test? Danny, a 24-year-old cancer researcher, smirks. "I think that was a – yeah, OK, I'll say it was a pass," he says.

The three of us bound up the path and join the others by a fire in the sitting room. I leaf through Danny's guest book filled with messages from sauna parties he threw in high school and college. "It was good, clean fun – no pun intended," he says.

Jaana concurs. "They'd hang around. We knew where they were, and we knew they weren't out drinking and getting in trouble," she says.

Cranberry juice was the drink of choice. "They'd come back with bloodshot eyes from saunaing too much, and everybody would be like, 'Man, you look like you had a hard night,' " Danny says. "And they'd say, 'Yeah, man, too much of the sauna.' "

***

We repeat the cycle another time: sauna, river, relax. The fire crackles and the river gurgles below. Some cultures – urban America not among them – have perfected the art of slowing down life for a few hours. "It's just a nice bonding experience," says Sinikka. "It's never a fast thing. You go down there and you sit and you chat, and you chat some more."

She credits the crisp nights spent sweating in a tongue-and-groove pine box with bringing the family closer to together. There's something about the privateness and primalness of the experience that breaks down inhibitions. "In the sauna, there's nothing else to do but talk," she says. "We talk about everything in there. And we still do."

Still, family members don't take as many saunas with friends as they used to. Everyone seems busier these days. The neighborhood has changed, too. Sauli tells the story of a guy who bought a house in the area that had a sauna in the basement. The buyer didn't know what the "extra room" was.

Sinikka has moved out, but Danny still lives at home and keeps the sauna fires burning. Friends remark on the beauty of the place. They understand why he stays. "I have one thing that's kept me here," he says.

Yeah, his mom pipes up, laughing: "It wasn't us, it was the sauna."

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