Mökki Sauna

For our family, the sauna at Mimmu’s dad’s mökki—lake cabin—is a hallmark of our relationship with Finland.

The sauna and guest room at Mimmu's dad's Mökki

I visited the mökki on my first trip here in December 2007. It meant a lot to Mimmu and her dad. It had to. It was one of the first things they showed me, as if to say, “this is us.”

We didn’t take a sauna that first time because the 3-building mökki complex—a main cabin with kitchen, living space, and bedroom; a storage/outhouse/guest room building; and a guestroom/sauna building--was basically winterized. But looking back, the 9 mile drive out of town on like, day two in Jyväskylä, implies the importance of the mökki, in their lives.

For Taavi and Iita, the mökki is an institution. Until recently, it was the only place we ever stayed as a home base while in Finland. The sauna is the centerpiece of that experience.

In earlier times, Finns were born in saunas. Literally. The sauna was where mothers delivered their children before hospitals became the modern norm. One could say that in Finland, the sauna is essential to life itself.

The mökki sauna is the most hallowed of saunas. There’s the electric sauna that makes this institution an easy, daily option in a modern home, in just about any setting. There are the rustic, old, homestead saunas in a detached building out in the yard, and even savu (smoke) saunas of olden days that were for centuries the functional necessities of everyday living in this northern reach. But the mökki sauna is a quality-of-life sauna. The classic Finnish mökki sauna is a resort, spa, wellness center, and spiritual centerpiece in one; a cultural touchstone to Finnishness, that today is a bridge between the practicalities of both the home electric sauna, and the old pioneer saunas that were a source of necessity for eons.

Mimmu’s dad's mökki sauna is an absolute classic. I love it. In a lifetime of saunas, it’s my hands down favorite. Built in the ‘70s as Finland emerged out of the post-war, post-industrial economy with Finns finding more leisure time on vacation at their lake properties, this sauna is modern and practical enough for entertaining, while rooted in the best of Finnish sauna tradition.

At the heart is a huge cast iron stove with a sizable belly to stuff full of wood that really gets the place hopping. On the left side is a 10 gallon appendage for lake water to heat in for washing. By the time the sauna is hot, so is your hot water. And it gets hot. Some evenings when it's dark, you can see the base of the stove pipe just above the rock bed turning slightly orange.

This sauna is log, and the smells are wonderful. You get the 50-year-old, hard, sap droplets on the wood that set the aromatic tone. The sap, the burning wood itself in the stove, the trace of smoke, and the array of soaps and sauna accoutrements typical in a Finnish sauna, make it a place that any of us blindfolded could pick from a smell palette as Ami Pappa’s mökki sauna.

The sauna has long been the primary washing place for Finns, but today, that’s less a thing. At the Turunen mökki, things revolve around the sauna though. It’s the only place to get clean. While this mökki has running water from a well in the main cabin, it isn’t treated and therefore not potable. We basically use it to wash dishes. We bring in drinking water from the city in jugs. The bathroom is still an outhouse for which we’ve been eyeing compostable or burn toilet options. So washing is all a lake and sauna thing. For us, it’s the most essential of the mökki as experience. Without the sauna, the mökki feels like a set of buildings on a lake.

The upper building houses the outhouse on the left side, with storage units sandwiching guest room #1 in the middle. The lower building faces the lake with a cafe-like guest room on the right and sauna on the left behind the covered entry.

I will have lifelong fondness for this sauna. Life at the cabin for me starts most days with making coffee, then heading out to get the sauna ready. Sometimes it’s an evening ritual or a summer day affair, but I love and will always cherish the purposeful mornings, loading wood into the hand carrier, stacking them sequentially in the carrier in order of need, strategizing the sizes and cuts of wood to get it going, then getting it stoked, then keeping it going. I might take in the morning light for a bit, which in Finland in the summer, at its angle to the sun, is quite simply some of the most sublime natural light one can find on earth, made better by the reflection off Leppavesi’s rich, blue water. If we had a “katiska” in the water overnight—a wire mesh fish trap allowed in Finland—I might check what, if anything was in it. Oftentimes it would be empty, but we’ve had instances with it full—as in almost-too-heavy-to-pull-from-the-lake, full—of särki, a small black-and-gold-shaded carp with orange eyes that is native to the area. Usually when that happens, there’s a big Northern Pike in there with them, with a distended belly full of little särki. If the katiska had treasure, I’d leave it until Taavi woke up to discover, which would make for a good portion of the morning’s noise on the lake as well as story-telling for the rest of the day.

When I'm good and ready, I’d set down my coffee cup, start shredding newspaper, placing it in the bottom of the stove I follow that up with kindling, sure to leave air space for the fire to catch, then I’d light it and manage it for about 10 minutes. As the fire takes hold, I make trips to the lake and back with a large paint bucket, filling the stove’s hot water cavity and a large plastic bucket on the sauna floor for cold lake water to mix to the right temperature.

While morning sauna is nice to get ahead of a day out and about, I might replicate the sauna-starting ritual to midday if the kids wanted to make a mökki day of it. Then I might start the sauna a little before or after lunch. I love night saunas too. The amber glow of the midnight sun and adjoining calmness of the lake at dusk is such a peaceful sauna experience.

Taavi and Mumma have night sauna when Taavi was a baby.

The act of taking sauna is pretty simple. Once the sauna is sufficiently hot—which is a personal preference—bouts of “löyly” (really a tricky to pronounce, but best phonetic description I can suggest is Low-oo-uh-luh, but it won’t be quite right) water are thrown from a ladle onto the rocks for steam—until you are no longer quite comfortable. You can follow this up anywhere with a simple sitting and cooling off in the air, but at the mökki, the lake makes all the difference. Instead of standing around or sitting and cooling slowly, you run out and jump into Leppavesi. The temperature shock makes your skin feel stingy, then it feels like it's alive. Your head clears as your dilated blood vessels and capillaries instantly constrict. I’ve found few things that make me feel more alive and well than a hot sauna and a lake. I’ve found no place I love it more than at the mökki.

A midday setup for Taavi and Iita could go on for hours. They’re kids. They don’t get tired of it. Mimmu and I can get our fill on the front end while the sauna is properly hot. I’m usually good with a dip or two, she often doesn't go in at all. Sometimes I will do three or four cycles if the spirit grabs me. But as the day wears on and the kids don’t want to stop, I ensure the sauna becomes less hot and more warm. I don’t want to slow roast them all day. I temper the wood going into the stove, relying on a single, larger piece of wood to do a slow, mellow burn until the kids finally succumb to fatigue and we can shut the operation down.

Hunger is never an issue though. This sauna has a guest room adjoining with picnic table, a couch that folds out into a bed, and a couple of cabinets. It’s easy to stage a sauna day from here. We keep fishing gear at the ready and while we’re staying there, ours towels dry on wooden branch pegs attached to the cabin walls. In front of both the cabin and sauna doors, a concrete block patio allows us to sprawl out and make it an occasion. We’ll lay out a smorgasbord of Finnish food and drink. It’s a simple form of entertainment that feels vital to us. No trip to Finland would feel complete without it.

Sauna lunch, mökki style

Living in Haukkala has shifted our sense of mökki as a home base. Yesterday, we made a portion of the day a mökki day. It was nice. The day brought back much of the feels and memories of our trips to Finland. It felt nostalgic, but it felt different.

Still, Iita washed the sauna windows like she has for years. Taavi kept a play-by-play going of what comes next and when. He always does. He likes a plan and likes to talk about it; lay it out and wonder out loud what we might do to make it better. I wonder where he got that? He is so expressive and open, I often fear a cynical world may crush his spirit. I know it won’t, but a parent worries.

They swam naked, did flips on their floaty toys, giggled, laughed, yelled for Mimmu and me to watch. They love to jump in with me, so as is customary, they check with me continually when I‘ll be ready to go into the lake so they’ll be ready and not miss it.

As my head broke the surface of Leppavesi on my second or third cycle yesterday, Iita’s head popped up simultaneously. She looked so happy, but so old. With lake water flowing off of her head, over her hair, her bright eyes, and her smile, she was a glass figurine of joy. She was such a beautiful thing in that moment, I almost burst into tears. It caught me off guard and I’ve been mulling it over since.

It might have been a long break in visiting the mökki. It also might be that we’ve just lived abroad for a year through a pandemic, we’re set to leave here, and I’m a little emotional. It might be that I missed how the mökki has always felt, and that moment captured its essence so purely after our long absence. It might be relief that even in this crazy year, Iita can pop up through the surface of the water and look that genuinely happy. It might have something to do with recognizing Iita growing older, and the time comes when it’s no longer practical to sauna and swim naked in a lake with your dad anymore. The clock of childhood is winding down for my kids, and I feel it.

Iita has been giving me a lot of kisses lately. I know my movement challenges are becoming more apparent. I lose my balance more often. My left leg moves on its own regularly and I sway slightly from time to time while working in the kitchen; a side effect of the drug that allows me to live relatively unbothered otherwise. I sense her subsequent need for showing me care. It might be that I’m just so happy that she, and Taavi, and I can love each other so completely, there are no barriers between use. We instinctively carry it for and with each other. There are no breakdowns. I am thankful for it and hope it never changes.

In that instant, I saw how this year has taught me what matters more than anything. I saw we are all capable of and susceptible to losing what’s important in life, just in the process of trying to survive. When that happens we might not ever know how or why we got there, and once there, I fear it's easy to stay lost there. I hope that never happens to me. I hope it never happens to them.

I forget sometimes that I’m lucky in that department, because there's a lot of hurt out there, and humans fight like hell to hide their hurt. That shows up in the most subtle of places. But love is easy when you know where it resides, and you share it and foster it between you another person.

That truth was on Iita’s face yesterday, just under the surface of Leppavesi, when it popped up and touched me. Mökki sauna just made it all so crystal clear,