Kuka lämmittää sauna?

The title of this post was written on a board over the doorway of my grandpa Reino’s sauna’s changing-room door. Its meaning was a mystery to me as a boy but I repeated the angular phrase as I sat on the bench removing my clothes before hopping in the sauna.

This Finnish phrase is one we‘ve asked ourselves after a good dinner and just before the cookie dough is pressed onto the pan for a bedtime dessert — Say! ”Who will heat the sauna?”

No one wants to go down the stairs and turn the dial on the electric 6kV heater, but starting the wood stove (aka “heater”) is a much bigger chore that carries its own risks. On a winter night it can take almost two hours to make rocks capable of turning cold water into instant clouds of steam. I remember at our home in Cambridge, Minnesota, I lit a fire in our outdoor sauna before assembling the bathers and then in a last-minute check stomped out through the snow in my boxers and boots to find the stove dark and cold.

Starting my grandpa’s sauna was a challenge. It was an unadorned steel box but we held it in reverence. Partly because it was grandpa’s. Partly because it had no guards or barriers so the extremely hot surface threatened anyone at the far end of the top bench or anyone rinsing off in the shower with their eyes closed.

Additional respect was owed it for the difficulty in lighting it. There were no EPA secondary combustion features on this stove. The six-inch diameter hole in the ceiling of the stove went straight into the chimney. The method I heard worked best was to set fire to a tightly wrapped newspaper, reach into the mouth of the stove and hold the flaming torch up the pipe-throat until it warmed enough to pull a draft. The stove preferred to send smoke back into the house and that happened more than once to a novice sauna starter.

When my brother-in-law built his sauna in his suburban basement, I encouraged him to spring for the remote start on his electric heater. I imagined all the after-supper nose-tapping not-its in his future. The cost was “significant” so I couldn’t blame him for going the manual route.

It occurs to me now that “someone” started a lot of wood-fire saunas for me and my cousins over the years. Children don’t — and maybe shouldn’t— think about what makes their world happen. I showed up and there were clean towels, buckets on the bench, and hot rocks on the stove. My grandpa, only grumpy in my limited memory, made ready for a van load of us show up in his driveway with clean towels and a warm sauna.