August 9, 2002

 mfinley.com   
"Burntside"

by Michael Finley

In the moonlight, the chimney atop the old sauna glows red from the fires within. Inside, a furnaceful of men who accept the fire yet are not burned. They sit, they sweat, they slap, they melt. They die a little and are reborn.

This is his favorite sauna in the world. In fact, except for this sauna, he doesn't even like saunas. But from his first experience here, six years ago, it has always led to exhilaration and relief. He sits in the fire, he dashes into the water, he rises rise toward a star-splattered sky, transformed.

He did not want to go to the lake this weekend. The family had just finished a 19-day car trip a week before. Work obligations were deadlines piling up, the world was a mess. He felt stressed out, and needed time to cogitate. The prospect of driving up to Lake Burntside seemed only to add to his woes.

But neither was he strong enough to put his foot down and say No, I will not go north and restore my aching spirit, now leave me alone! Instead, he limited his visit to a single weekend, while his wife worked the week as camp nurse.

When he got there his wife was doing health assessments, so she urged him to drop in the cabin of their friends Ethelred and Louise. He looked forward to seeing them, but he was sheepish too. In recent months he had become … a drag. Health, family matters, business problems -- the bad news never stopped. Even his dog, whom he betrayed to the kennel with a kiss, became insecure around him, licking and licking and licking.

Sometimes he thought of a prayer from an old poem: Lord, send my roots rain.

But instead of rain he got steam. Ethelred invited him to the camp sauna just before midnight. Three rows of benches accommodate perhaps naked 16 men. As late arrivals they become strap hangers, standing naked in the slow-flickering shadows. The furnace casts some light, but the air is so hot you can't look at the faces without burning your eyeballs. Best to draw your lids low, and cast your countenance downward.

Two men are talking about acetylene equipment. Another group talk about winter saunas. A youth is sitting on the lowest bench, his head buried in his hands.

A legacy man is saying that the sauna house was built in 1913 by Finns from Finland. The basic furnace cracks and must be replaced every year or so, so hot does it burn. Every ten minutes or so a clothed man enters, taps the temperature gauge and calls out the conditions: 190 degrees, 204 degrees, finally 210 degrees. It is too hot in here to live.

With a tilt of the head Ethelred and he agree they have had enough and bolt out the door, skittering like men in chains down the soggy-carpeted runway to the cold waters of Burntside Lake.

Astonishingly, the thing he thought he dreaded -- the heated cup shattering as it is held under running water -- becomes the thing most welcome to him. It is like going from salamanders one moment, radiating in the embers, to sea lions the next, racing under ice.

It is all a man ever is, from the clamber to birth to the experience of love, from death in battle to being seated in the mead hall of the gods.

The moment of reincarnation must be like this, when the soul sloughs off one wasted shell and dives fresh into a new one. It is not brains thinking now, but every cell that has been scoured and refitted, a trillion bags of oxygen bursting in the body.

And as he stands looking north, though tall pines trees block the view to what may or may not be the northern lights, he feels the colors flashing inside him, rose and silver, turquoise and white, man rising though ice and fire.

He knows it's temporary. Life does not stop being life. The cycle continues, up, down. Astonishing bright lights will give way to dull blues. A man steps in front of a mirror and sags. Inhale the child, exhale the ghost.

But for the moment, he feels utterly beautiful.

mfinley.com 
_{COPYRIGHT (c) 2002
by MICHAEL FINLEY}