The Finnish Touch: A Traditional Finnish Sauna Experience in Pembroke, Massachusetts

It’s a bright December afternoon and I’m standing on the banks of Furnace Pond, a crooked stretch of water tucked away in the woods of Pembroke, Massachusetts. I’m dressed in nothing but a pair of swimming briefs. A small set of concrete stairs disappears into the not-yet-frozen waters below me. I’m trying to avoid thinking about how it will feel when I jump in.

I am not alone here. Just behind me stands an authentic Finnish sauna that volunteers fire up year-round. Set at the water’s edge, the building resembles a long green ranch house. A men’s entrance at one end (there’s a women’s entrance on the other) leads into a mudroom-like space where visitors strip down and hang their garments on hooks, as they prepare to pass through another door into the heat blast of the old wood-powered sauna.

But just as it’s been practiced and revered in Finland for centuries, the sauna experience here is only half about heat. To do a Finnish sauna the right way, you must also plunge into a body of extremely cold water. This is why I’m still hesitating on the banks of Furnace Pond when a young guy wrapped in a striped towel ambles over.

“Sorry, but is this your first time?” he asks with a recognizable Nordic accent.

“It’s my first visit here,” I reply. “I’ve been to a sauna before.”

“Well, it’s just that … I noticed you’re completely dry,” he says.

A chill of self-consciousness makes my hairs stand up, and I ask him if I did something wrong. He points to the sauna building.

“You want to begin [there],” he explains. “You get hot and hotter, and you stay until the only thing keeping you alive is the thought of the cold.”

“And then I do the pond plunge?”

He nods. “You stay in the water as long as you can stand it,” he says. “Then you climb back out and you stand on the shore, in the sun, until the only thing that’s keeping you alive is the thought of being hot. And then you do all of that a few more times.”

I watch my new friend descend the stairs into Furnace Pond. The surrounding woods are quiet, and I can hear his breath sharpening, and then softening, as he submerges his entire torso into the water with ease.

*****

The sauna on Furnace Pond is the handiwork of the Uljas Koitto Temperance Society (UKTS), a volunteer-run social club founded by Finnish immigrants in 1890 to bring people together for traditional activities that didn’t involve alcohol. The sauna is one of the oldest and most enduring customs in Finland, where the winters are incredibly cold and dark, and where the circulatory, pain-relieving benefits associated with saunas earned them the nickname “the poor man’s pharmacy.” Historians have pegged the earliest Finnish saunas as taking root around 7,000 BC, when they were little more than holes in the ground filled with heated stones. But as humans grew more adept at harvesting and burning wood, saunas began taking on the forms of shacks and cabins. Millions of them now speckle Finland’s countryside.

According to Kirsten af Klinteberg, board vice president of UKTS, it was a resemblance to the Finnish countryside that inspired the club’s founders to set their headquarters on the shores of Furnace Pond in 1926. “Pembroke has lots of pine trees and lakes, and this reminded them of Finland,” Klinteberg says, noting that the club’s HQ was originally located up the road in Quincy. (The promise of jobs at the Quincy granite quarries had drawn many Finnish immigrants to Massachusetts’s South Shore beginning in the 19th century.) When a parcel of wooded land in Pembroke became available, the club founders pooled their resources, signed the purchase papers, and began relocation. And one of the first things they did at their new home, Klinteberg says, was build a sauna.

In America, saunas are an amenity—a treat that comes with a gym membership or a stay at a swanky hotel. But in Finland, saunas are not just integral to winter living; they also serve as community centers, where people from all walks of life congregate for conversation and a sense of belonging. It’s sort of like hanging out at your neighborhood bar after a long day’s work, except everyone’s wrapped in towels and sweating like a holiday roast.

“In the sauna, you hear all sorts of languages,” Klinteberg says. “We’ve had Japanese students coming down from Cambridge, since they have the onsen [hot spring baths] in Japan. We’ve had Russians and Ukrainians, and once we even had this big group of Mormon teenagers visit us.”

While the UKTS sauna is technically a private facility, guests can visit on Saturdays for a fee of $40. Some go on to become either members or “friends” of the club—including my roommate, Emily, who initially told me about the sauna.

“There’s no ego in the sauna,” she explained a few weeks before my first UKTS expedition. “I see mothers in there, older women, and women my age. You find commonalities in each other, and as you see people week after week, you start to feel invested. You start to care for them.”

*****

Newly enlightened—and ecstatic at the prospect of getting to delay my pond submersion for the next 15 minutes—I scurry back inside, hang up my towel, and throw open the door to the sauna, stepping into the intense heat. Body hairs that were standing up out in the cold are now crackling. Set against the sauna’s wooden walls are three levels of benches, which I find packed with glistening men who range from 20-somethings to elder statesmen. (The women’s sauna is on the other side of an ancient-looking brick dividing wall and heated by the same wood stove.)

The men who aren’t busy taking generous chugs from their water bottles are swapping life updates. The thin, bearded guy behind me is going to Peru to hike the Inca Trail in March. His bench mate is on the hunt for a new job. The fellow sitting right across from me, his torso a gallery of tattoos, is wearing an elf-like hat that’s soaked with water as a way to provide a little extra heat relief. He introduces himself as Leif and tells me where I can find the spigot to soak my own elf hat.

Leif’s presumption that I’ve brought my own elf hat is a warm gesture in a very warm place; it’s an affirmation of belonging. What I don’t yet realize is that this toasty camaraderie is as much a part of the sauna as the heat and the cold. It’s one thing to sweat or shiver in solitude at some expensive health club or private estate. But when you do this with other people, in a sauna, you emerge with more than a surge of endorphins.

I manage to endure the heat for a solid 15 minutes, and by the end of that relatively short amount of time, I’ve swapped names, listened to stories, and absorbed more pro tips for my next visit (topping the list: Wait at least an hour after eating before entering a sauna). And now … it’s time to go back outside.

As I approach Furnace Pond, it doesn’t look as frigid as it did before. This is a fleeting moment of self-delusion, shattered the second my torso meets the water and my involuntary shriek rings out across the water. But even as the cold shock causes my blood to surge, the fact that my heart hasn’t stopped beating and my toes haven’t frozen solid thrills me. This is my element. Perhaps this is my new community.

Time will tell. There are still three more months of winter in New England, and as I start the drive back to Boston at dusk, through a landscape populated by cars, strip malls, and solitary houses, I feel like the darkness of winter is swallowing me whole again. But I’ve just seen a glimpse of another winter, in the woods on Furnace Pond. When I get home, my cheeks are still pink with warmth.

Miles Howard

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