STEAM & SAUNA ROOM STORIES

THE RITUAL OF THE SAUNA

By Paula Bock, Seattle Times staff reporter.

Sjusjoen, Norway - The wooden door handle was warm. I pulled it open. A blast of hot air.

In front of me was a wall of pale winter skin streching from ceiling to floor. Five German fraus and two youngish Norwegian women were sharing the twilight hour before dinner in an overheated wooden box. In animated language, they relived the day's ski adventure, lambasted current and former husbands - and sweated profusely.

In Norway, the sauna is more than a place. It is a physical and social ritual.

First, I showered. Then I walked through a cold anteroom lined with wood benches before entering the hot sauna, a pine-paneled room heated with red electric coils and speckled mineral rocks.

Everyone sat, sprawled or scrunched themselves on two tiers of slatted benches. A few had towels, mostly to keep sweat from dripping in the eyes. In such a crowded place with so many bodies, I felt a bit modest. But in 120 degree heat, modesty melts fast; the muscles and mind want to relax.

In that little room, I realized these strange women and I were all one big collection of elbows, knees, breasts, weary muscles, folds of fat, splotches of red, drops of sweat rising out of the skin.

The women's voices rose and fell, carried by steam into the pores of the mellow wood. How much that wood has heard!

The evening's conversation, they told me in English, was about the icy windblown trail down to Lillehamer and whether they should come back to Norway to ski next winter. And a minute ago? When everyone sat up, the repartee ricocheting off the walls? Oh that! they laughed. That was when they were talking about first husbands.

To start a good sweat takes a few minutes. When you initially enter the hot room, it's hard to tell whether the moisture on your skin is from the shower or from sweat. The clue is that sweat beads are smaller, closer together and spring from the temples, between eyebrow and ear. Then droplets ooze from the sides of the neck, the breastbone, behind the knees. Suddenly your whole body is moist.

A sauna should always feel good, never uncomfortably hot, the women instruct me. When you feel too hot or dizzy, it is time to start the cooling cycle. Leave the hot room and rest on a bench in the anteroom for a few minutes before taking a cool shower and returning for another round of hot and cold.

And later go to dinner feeling warm, tingly, totally relaxed.
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