Heating the sauna

A wood-fired sauna is not difficult, but it does not hurry. Ours takes a little over an hour from a cold stove in winter, and the hour is part of it. You split the kindling, carry two buckets from the hole in the ice, lay the fire, and then there is nothing to do but feed it and wait.

Birch burns hot and clean and is what everyone uses. Spruce spits. Alder is said to be the best of all and I have never had enough of it to find out. The wood has to be properly dry — two summers under a roof — or you spend the evening coaxing a fire that would rather go out.

The stones are ready when water thrown on them vanishes with a crack rather than a hiss. Somewhere around eighty degrees on the upper bench is comfortable; hotter than that and conversation stops.

Then the door, the dark, the short path to the lake, and the stars, which in February are very many and very sharp. People ask whether the cold water is unpleasant. For about two seconds, yes.