Finnish Women

I’ve been traveling for eighteen hours when I meet a girl with a classic Nordic appearance who is beautiful without makeup or accessory. The Finnish are beautiful people. Their country is thickly forested with numerous large lakes and a lively population of healthy mosquitoes. Second to Japanese, the Finnish language consists of the highest percentage of vowel use. She tells me this in mild conversation and I listen to a continual flow of melodious vowels and gentle undertones broken by guttural ka’s.

It is a tiny wooden house on the lake’s edge that she takes me to. She gives me a robe and I don’t know where it came from and I don’t care. I shadow her motions as we step inside. My senses are heightened as I follow her lead and I am acutely conscious of the outcome of my unfolding actions. I have become aware that I will be in fact, truly bathing with this girl and am relieved that I do not feel nervous and was never one of reserve. She begins to take off her clothes shamelessly, I hang back, trying to stay one step behind her. She takes off her shirt, so do I, ties her hair up, so do I. Preoccupied with averting my eyes from her body, I am unaware of my own nakedness. The Finnish do not understand modesty. Embarrassment is embarrassing. In her accent and rolling syllables she asks “Why are people shy?” It’s meant as a statement and she touches the side of my waist, “You have a beautiful body. We all have the same. We all are the same no?” We turn to the heavy wooden door, I push, am supposed to pull. The wood under my hand is warm and the air behind it is as thick and moist as Asian rain. A variety of bodies and a wave of wet heat hover before me and without hesitation I step into the enveloping warmth of foreign tradition. Women’s voices filter through a haze of sodden air and dissolve into the wooden walls. Everything is wood. The sauna is similar to a small log cabin, thick pine logs stacked on top of each other into a low ceiling. If I was taller I would have to bow my head like some of the other women. Women of various ages, all who are beautiful in a state of conventional ambiance, all who are naked except one girl who is wearing a bikini. She is so clearly American and stands out like red in a room. They are embarrassed for her and avert their eyes as if she were the one who was naked and everyone else clothed, but no one says anything. They are polite as is the way with so many foreign cultures. “It is better than American spa yes? The air is so fresh” the Nordic girl says in my ear, beckoning with her hands, combing them through the syrupy air, speaking close to me as if the density of the billowing steam reverberates sound.

Light strains through a single window and rivulets of condensation allow me to glimpse the lake outside. There are many summer houses dotting the shore of this lake and the many other lakes in Finland. Saunas are everywhere, in almost every household, and usually within a few feet of the lakes edge. Steps lead directly from the door of the sauna into the water. There are more steps to, which I will climb to the second level inside the sauna. Near the door, they are wet, the wood slimy underfoot, but the air is a bit lighter here and women sit thigh to thigh facing each other on parallel benches. The intimacy of bathing together is apparent through the manner of conversation held on these benches. They discuss things that make them feel; events that occurred in their day, their children, places they go, places they want to go. Men. I listen to them laugh, my hair hanging in wet strips around my face. I am the only person in the sauna with dark hair and this is the only factor that reminds me that I haven’t grown up in this culture, that this is something I have never done before. Sweat is seeping out of me now, running down my back, creasing through my eyelids, dripping off my nose, tracing down my shoulder. More hands throw water onto the stove and it screams off the hot metal, exploding into the stifling air. The heat is to intense for me now and I stand up from the benches where the women will remain to discuss delicate food.

Soon chunks of soap appear and when they do the air is sweetened. A homemade bar is pressed to my hand, it smells like flowers and lathers like whipped cream. Thick pale suds glide to the boards underfoot and elderly women hold the elbows of the more stable as to not slip on the wet rock, but I do. I slide and my hands grasp the wet bodies of strangers, with sweat in my eyes I cannot see them but I hear their kind laughter and it makes me forget that I have dark hair. I pick up a bristled brush from a bench and scrub the soap into circles on my skin. A woman touches my shoulder and offers to wash my back, I guess that she is about the age of my mother and I hand her the brush gratefully, hold my hair and shake my head when she asks if she rubs to hard. With her fingertips on my bare skin, I share a moment with this stranger, more intimate than any I’d ever shared with the very woman who gave birth to me. I fail to comprehend the gravity of the realization I’ve just made for I am drunk on the air, my inhalation and sight obstructed. I can feel the molecules of heavy air come in, my lungs hang with its weight and finally reject its moisture reluctantly through the back of my teeth.

We are going to rinse now, metal pans pass from hand to hand, some with hot water, some with cold that I can’t understand the origin of. I almost find myself surprised that this step is necessary, as if I expect to become cleaner and cleaner, building upon the process of bathing with these people, not conclude it, rinse it away, dry it off. Some have massaged the soaps lather into their hair and have to hang their heads upside down to rinse it free. I feel as though the very inside of my mouth is sweating and swallow with my lips together.

The atmosphere within the thick air is forgiving of not only appearance but of thoughts, manners, and mind-set. Everyone is welcome and included, absorbed into the Fin’s unguarded traditions. Strangers wash the backs of one another, and I think that maybe it’s the result of nudity that compassion circulates from one to the next. Passing by way of women, who don’t know me, women I don’t know, will never know, yet who share with me, an unrepeatable experience . When in sauna, one temporarily surrenders all concerns, these women gather to bathe, relax and rejuvenate. The lack of privacy within the walls of the tiny log cabin defends us, soap and sweat unite us, binding us together, a family of females. Simultaneously, in a wet mass, we struggle ourselves out, into the clear twilight, slipping in one another’s puddles and footprints, some diving head first, others stepping gingerly into the lake, into water so cold breath seizes inside me. And it is this moment, the revolution of bitter water consuming my body, striking the clarity of my conscience, that I realize I have just experienced for the first and hopefully last time in my life, a moment of absolute equivalence, felt thoroughly absent of all identity in a circumstance lacking even the slightest of criticisms. I have lived in a moment of entirety, I’ve experienced Finnish perfection, täydellisyys.