Without our brave Minnesota friends, we are sharing this experience with a dozen 30-something travellers and nomads. The sauna we built in our Minnesota basement as a COVID project was likewise usually filled with young adventurers. While our peers politely declined (“You’re just trying to get us naked!”, laughed Mr. Doug), Zekiah’s friend group would pile in merrily. Our sauna built for 6 adults could fit 16 teens, whose version of the cold plunge was to run half-naked down the snowy streets.

To my credit, I never succumbed to the urge to lock the doors and make them beg to get back in from the -20 degree cold. Perhaps it’s PTSD from my first-ever true sauna experience at Whistler Mountain, where I accidentally locked my big brother outside the hotel after we had run outside to roll in the snow. While we sat in the sauna trying to thaw, he was running around the entire hotel complex with bare feet in a 1980’s Speedo, finally being let back inside by some appreciative female guests. I hid behind my big cousin Rob when he finally shivered his way back into the hot box, and to this day don’t know if he believes it was an accident.

Karma got the last laugh a few decades later at a grade 2 parents social gathering. In Sarah’s words:

Kristi and I left the sauna early, but couldn’t back the car out of the snowy Ecovillage parking lot. Miraculously 2 angels appeared in our headlights in the form of Ricky and Patrick. Wearing nothing but boxer shorts they leaned over the car and heaved, muscles straining, hot steam rising from their glistening skin as they lifted the car free, then scampered barefoot through the snow back into the dark night and hot steamy sauna from whence they came.

(OK, I wrote that, but it’s how I hope Kristi and Sarah remember us…)

Our leader splashes water on the hot rocks, then pushes the steam around the sauna with intricate, graceful and sometimes vigorous swooshes of his wormwood weed whisk. Trusting that both the sauna’s construction materials and our fellow sweaters’ low bean intake will prevent off-gassing, we open ourselves to the blasts of burning wind that “opens up the pores, promotes sweating, and enhances detoxification.”

I recognize the skinny young man laying prostate below us by his semi-transparent tighty-whitey swim shorts. We met a few days ago in the changeroom, in those same descriptive shorts, as he simultaneously dried his shirt with a blowdryer and did curls with the changeroom bench.

We finish with a final cold outdoor shower and cold plunge, then sit around the fire pit enjoying the warm tropical breeze. A 5-minute walk home and a contented slumber await for us detoxified, deeply relaxed sojourners. Like most rituals, I don’t believe most of the underlying theory and hoopla, but settle into it enough to feel cleansed and relaxed afterwards, and grateful for the sweet memories of all my fellow sweat-mates and shiver-buddies of saunas and cold-plunges past.