Levi Finland - part 2

We had no internet available at the cabin so I will back date these from my notes.

Good meetings in Copenhagen today and caught an early flight out to Helsinki. Another prop plane which still drives me crazy but I was mysteriously upgraded to 'first class'. First Class on an 80 seat plane involves 4 people getting hot meals while the rest get mineral water and the chance to buy some $4 pretzels. The meal was good w/ some cold pork but the potatoes were cold too. I love cold food which makes my wife question my sanity but potatoes is where I draw the line. They can never be cold, its like eating warts.

The Hilton is the one I have stayed at previously right on the Gulf of Finland. The water is about half frozen so I sat and watched tiny icebergs floating around as the sun went down.

In the taxi at 6 AM (note that is 5 AM Sweden time but who is counting?) after the standard Hilton breakfast. At the airport, we meet the hosts and the fawning begins. None of the guys in my company will touch wallets for the rest of the trip. Strangely its free seating on a 737 for the 1 hour flight. The runway appears to be about 3' longer than the minimum strip required for landing the plane but we did in fact survive.

Over to the cabin for a couple of hours of meetings. The cabin is 3 stories (that would be 2 in Sweden where the ground floor is #0). First floor has 2 bedrooms, a living room for meetings and a sauna built for about 15. 2nd floor is a 2 more bedrooms, dining area, kitchen and sitting room. Top floor is a huge master suite w/ private sauna and a big bedroom w/ 2 beds. The big guy from our company gets the suite and I have to split w/ the other American in the other top floor room. The place is a beautifully constructed cabin, rough looking logs exposed throughout.

As we tour around we find the place is well stocked and particularly in booze. Beer, wine, cognac and Vodka enough to party for a month. In the living room for a couple of hours of presentations. Lunch at 1 consisting of a cream-based reindeer and potato soup along with some buttered dark Finnish rye bread. Excellent, simple flavorful food.

Everyone in the group is an accomplished downhill skier but me and when we hit the slopes after lunch they split off a couple of the host guys who followed me everywhere I went no matter how slowly or poorly. They only offered advice when I asked for it specifically and otherwise hovered appearantly only to call an ambulance for the looming compound fracture. I actually did ok for it having been my 3rd time skiing (last being about 10 years ago). I took a couple of falls and tweaked my previously non-bad knee enough to cause a limp through Sunday. We all met up at a shack somewhere near the middle of the mountain for cocoa/rum and watched Finns dance to their national country-ish music. They have an affected sort of two-step and they were amazingly graceful in ski boots while I clomped around like a Yeti.

Quick showers after ski and off to the 'big adventure' the host guys kept alluding darkly to all day. We pile into our rented van and drive about 35 KM into the big middle of nowhere. The last 10 KM were through a forrest path and we were apparently on a snowmobile trail. Finally arrive at a sort of village consisting of about 6 buildings all built at least partly under the ground and snow. The shaman man comes out to meet us and he is so authentic looking to be a bit creepy. The Samis are indigenous to northern Sweden, Norway and Finland and are reindeer herders. The story I got was that they are a Stone Age culture that got pushed north by the Indos that came along later. Facially, they remind me alot of Native Americans from North America but with a bit more of an Asian look around the eyes. He had a 'full' beard but it was very slight and wispy and no more than 2-3 inches long anywhere. His eyes were quite small and appeared bloodshot either from heavy drinking or the constant presence of wood smoke (likely both). He wore mid-calf fur covered boots, leather pants (in Irish terms think Daniel Day Lewis Last of the Mohicans instead of Bono) and a buckskin looking leather jerkin (I think that is the term for a long shirt??). He had a fox on his head. It was dead but I was able to identify it as a fox when he turned around and I discovered its head still attached to the back of the hat like a Lappish mullet.

The area had no electricity, and he gave us a tour of 2 of the buildings right off stopping only to point out which was the poop tree (no tp in sight and all plants covered w/ snow but I didn't stop to ask) and which was the pee tree. The first ones we toured were for his guests. Imagine a round room with a massive center pole. You enter through a set of 2 doors about 3.5' high to a room containg a beautiful (if rough) stone fireplace on the right and the whole left side of the circle room is a long, curved bed covered in reindeer skin blankets that were surprisingly soft to sit on. He joked that 10 men could sleep here and 20 people would fit if half were women (think vertical...duh). The other buildings were for wood and food storage leading up to the 'main house'. Same basic round shaped large room with a long dining table that will seat 10. His bed takes up the whole right side of the cabin and a kitchen extends out behind the huge stone fireplace that is putting out a remarkable quantity of heat for the small fire in the box. I would imagine that those stones got hot and then just stay that way forever with a little fire to keep them rolling.

He offers some blessings to begin the purification ritual and we are each given a cordial of some homebrew. Downing the stuff is like swallowing razor blades and he throws a bit into the fire for dramatic effect and it momentarily got Hiroshima up the chimney.

We follow him out to the smoke sauna set a good distance away from the other buildings. I could write for 3 days on what I have learned about saunas and the Finnish sauna culture but I will try to keep this to a reasonable epic. A smoke sauna is a wooden building containing a fireplace covered in stone. A fire is built and the room is mostly sealed for the entire day. After something like 8 hours, the smoke is released leaving a great deal of heat behind. Additional important facts include 1) you sauna naked 2) sauna is co-ed and 3) you get a little towel to sit on (the towel is yours forever and trading is discouraged).

For a typical American, nudity is an uncomfortable arena. Those of us who have played some team sport and have had more time in the locker room culture are a bit more used to it but still, naked is not the usual state you wind up in at the end of a first day of a customer meeting (unless your hosts are really into spending money and you don't mind venereal disease). Fortunately I had the situation explained to me beforehand so I would not make a retard of myself when the time came to drop-em.

The staging are is a small porch in front of the sauna and the outside temp is about 14F (-10 C). One gets naked there and takes clothes in hand to the little indoor area to hang them on pegs. Ever been naked in 14 degrees? It stings.

I left my glasses outside partially to avoid the fogging up and mostly to avoid seeing my pasty, overweight colleagues. We come in and sit on raised benches. I only had about 4 inches clearance for my head and had to be careful not to burn my hand when wiping my hair. The fireplace was about 3-4 feet high, stone and had no fire that I could make out. A tiny window let in enough sunlight to see outlines of people but otherwise it was quite dark. I think they said it was about 140 F (60 C) when we first came in but it was all in C so I couldn't be sure i was converting it right all the time. You immediately start to sweat but there is so much humidity (not like jumping in a Tucson car at noon on a 118 degree day) that its not uncomfortable. Shaman passes round a bucket of what to me felt like freezing water and I later noticed was about normal room temp. I think the purpose of that water was to prevent your hair bursting into flames later when he really got the thing going.

Then he starts throwing water on the pile of rocks on top of the fireplace and it begins to get hot. You feel the wave of heat hit like sheet being wrapped around you. We got up to about 176 F (80 C) and stayed there for about 10 minutes sweating like mad. He then took it up to our final cruising altitude of 200 F (90 C). We sat there for 5 minutes and then he came by to baptize us. The way he was facing me (holding what my bad eyes did not until later identify as a bucket and ladle) I was concerned that I was about to be pissed on and I began racking my brain for ways to duck and dodge. Fortunately he showered me w/ was in fact water that was just below boiling and felt like the coolest refreshment of my life. My new name is Ailu (Eye-Loo) in Lappish. The name is just a name and has no real significance but I will now insist on being called by it forever.

After everyone is blessed he takes us one by one out to a small shack that has a pit going down about 12' to part of a spring whose water remains reliably at about 33 F (1 C as in just a hair above freezing). The last part of the ritual is to climb slowly down the ladder and immerse oneseself fully in the water. Notably the shaman does not accompany you down the ladder into the water. There was a moment just as I reached the bottom of the ladder and right before I dipped my toe in that it occurred to me exactly how insane this was. I don't actually know the effect of submerging into nearly frozen water. It can not be good and might be dangerous.

Turns out it is good. You get this amazing electric current over all of your skin and can practically hear the sizzle as your skin (still blazing hot) hits the freezing water. It actually makes a little steam cloud. To get the full effect I had to find a way to scrunch down quite a bit and managed to get underwater up to my armpits. I will refrain from the discussion of the effect of cold water on various body parts but will say that the effect is frightening, disturbingly long lasting but finally wholly reversible.

From the cold pit we went back to the sauna room for more heat treatment. By the way, this was all accomplished with a remarkable paucity of alcohol. Presented with this situation 1 year ago, I would have posted the booze threshold around 12 beers. Sitting in the sauna this time, the subject of snow swimming comes up. I have survived the extremes of heat and cold to the degree that I am now feeling invincible so the challenge of snow swimming is readily accepted.

To Snow Swim, one runs from the sauna and dives into the field surrounding the sauna (still naked mind you) and thrashes around in the snow (ostensibly 'swimming' to some designated point and back) to prove how impervious one is to the effects of cold.

I am always amazed by the brief moments of clarity I have in the middle of doing things. Its like my brain does a little aside to some imaginary audience. In this case it happended as I was soaring through the air toward a field of untouched snow that I began to muse on the properties of snow shoes. Given a certain composition of snow, a snow shoe will distribute the weight of the snow shoe-r sufficiently to let them 'float' on the top layer of the snow instead of sinking deeply into the drifts. I pondered the relationship of this phenomenon to my particular situation. There existed a possibility that should I land sprawled (but twisted slightly so as not to 'belly' or otherwise flop onto a semi-frozen surface) I will stay on top of the snow like a giant snow shoe. If I sink, does anyone have a clear idea of how deep the snow is? Have I sufficiently thought through the ramifications of diving into a field of snow of an indertiminate depth not fully sure if I will remain atop or plunge straight down? Also, will I be impaled by a hidden birch sapling?

Turns out I was a snow shoe and that the snow was kinda frozen on top so when I landed it stung quite a bit. My mission now is to 'swim' over to the big rock and back. I think that the idea is to sink down in the snow a bit so that I would plow through it and get all snowy in the process. Due to the crusty top layer, I was not sinking deeply and the half scoot crawl I ended up with began to scrape uncomfortably. Again focusing on the snow shoe principle I got my hands under me and focused more weight in smaller area and busted right through the snow down about a foot. The swim to the rock is nice and I really don't feel the cold at all. So much so that I stop just before I get out to do a little snow angel. This plan fails when I try to sit up. Sitting up involves redistributing weight from all limbs down to my butt. This re-focusing causes me to sink a good 3' into the snow. I am now staring up a the gray sky at the bottom of a snowy grave, in a sort of fetal crunch feverishly calculating how to become a snow shoe again. Every time I put a limb down to push my self up, that limb sinks deeper into what I am beginning to imagine is the Grand Canyon of snow. I finally reached a firm level of frozen-ness at about 4' and was able to crawl out from there.

I hate to perseverate but its important to emphasize that I remained naked throughout this adventure.

To further blow your mind, I just found out that the Shaman has a website. Obviously these pics are all taken in the summer and towels have been provided for modesty sake but still, my shaman is online. That rocks.