Heaven and Home

The match flared into a luxury of curled bark, and crackling began soon afterwards. I’m used to lighting fires which call for long and gentle coaxing, but this stove was hungry to begin and soon there were flames which pulled at the logs of the stove. I started to worry the sauna would begin without me, so I pulled off my clothes and waited in a state of grave excitement.

My glasses fogged up, but heat remained elusive. After an uncertain start, the thermometer on the wall began to rise up from thirty degrees. I began to feel more confident that I was having a sauna, but then I began to doubt myself. The thermometer on the wall had the capacity to rise all the way up to one hundred and twenty degrees. I was stuck at forty three.

So I looked for ways to ramp the heat. I fiddled with vents and adjusted the logs in the burner. By regulating the airflow to the fire, I noticed a sharp swell of heat. The stones began to glow, so I spooned some water upon them, and I was pleased to find that their gentle hiss was beginning to grow roots. Steam bloomed around me, and the thermometer’s needle crept upwards. Emboldened, I did more. 

I noticed a real change when the thermometer struck sixty degrees, and the effect was heightened thereafter. I took off my shorts and sat naked on the wooden slats, feeling sweat begin to slicken on my back. My forearms bulged and streams of moisture broke down the central line of my chest. This body of mine is strangely unexplored. I ask very little of it, so it was curious to watch myself begin to work through an external change. I was glossy and I shone in the half-darkness; I had become aware of my legs and the flatness of my belly; the prospect of myself engaged in something newly physical. Living in strictures and buttoned-up self-denial, it’s easy to misread the smallest physicality for something erotic – but there is something of lust here beyond the simple novelty of myself. Slick and heaving, there was a note of coitus in that small, solitary box in the woods.

At eighty degrees, I was slick with sweat and my breath had begun to flutter. I felt more confident than ever that I was having a sauna, but was it possible that I had only just begun. I know that a sauna is properly followed by a plunging immersion in water; that there were lakes outside, and the prospect of a swim in ice which has only recently thawed. But having no lead to follow, it was hard to know when I was done. The sweat had become a new experience of its own; there was no more water to pour on the stones and the fire raged in its box. I thought of leaving, then wondered if I had done enough to experience the full effect. It had taken half an hour to reach the requisite heat, and I was partly appalled by the extravagance of wasting that work by leaving. In truth, the entire process struck me as a strange and undeserving treat; you can live without such things, so how can you square the lascivious indulgence of nudity and excess?

But after I had plunged into the lake, the subsequent calm was devastating. I tried to access memories of troubles past and ongoing, but I couldn’t put my hands upon them. Standing up to my knees in black, unmemoried water, I pressed a towel to my face and blinded myself. There was nothing more than birdsong in the trees, and the distant sound of my own more-easy breathing.