Deep Winter

I haven't written yet about Gary's latest project. He recently restored an old Finnish log smoke sauna (savusauna), which dates back to the 1880s. We spotted it on the banks of the Cat River, abandoned, when we were driving down the highway south of Menagha many years ago. We offered the owner $500 for it, and after initially turning us down, he accepted the following year when we asked him again. It was too good to let go. We marked each log, disassembled the building -- with a flock of domestic turkeys watching our every move, and occasionally commenting in unison -- and brought the logs to the island over the ice that same year. With help from friends to pour the foundation and help get the logs set up, Gary finally got it finished (or mostly finished) this past fall.

The front part of this building is a sitting room made from logs from an old farmhouse we disassembled near Underwood. The back is the sauna itself. Gary finished the inside with insulation and cedar paneling, so it's very clean and spare -- and it smells heavenly when the fire is going. He made the benches from cedar and aspen.

We got a wood-fired sauna stove from an outfit up in Tower called Kuuma. The floor is granite (which we bought at an irresistible sale at Home Depot about 10 years ago), and the removable floor mats are cedar, made by Peter Lofstrom. Gary kept the original window next to the door; it holds a candle, which illuminates both the sauna and the sitting room. The roof of the sauna is tile, which we got an an irresistible garage sale a few years back.

The sitting room isn't done yet, but it will have a small woodburning stove, benches around the outside walls, and plenty of hooks for robes and towels. I installed this mosaic on the wall behind the stove. (The original sauna had been burned in this area, so Gary filled in with concrete block, which needed to be covered over.)

We've fired up the sauna a handful of times so far, with the biggest group -- my family -- on New Years Day night. It was 22 below zero Fahrenheit that night, and we had a mens' sauna followed by a womens'. There's a shower rigged up on the outside of the building for post-sauna showers. Showering outside in the buff at 22 below is a terrific way to kick off a new year. After that, you feel like you can survive anything!

Gary bought himself a handmade rowboat that he's starting to restore. It's an Oselver, a Norwegian style rowboat: low-profile (24 inches tall), pointed on both ends, 18 feet long. It probably leaks like a sieve, but Gary is going to tenderly try to get it afloat this spring. As my brother-in-law says, it should go like the wind in the water, if we can get it going at all. It requires two rowers, so I guess that means that I'll be one of them. It's a beautiful boat, with  cedar lap-strake construction and hand-forged rivets. Gary will likely have to build a shed to keep it in -- probably just a roof over the top of it.

Deep winter has set in, and it's not a pretty sight around here. Here's what our back yard looks like in winter. The Subaru is a novelty. We get to drive to the island for about a month each winter, after the ice is good and thick and the snowmobilers have packed down a trail on the shoreline. Besides the car, we have a variety of things scattered around the back yard that help us get through winter: a trailer full of firewood next to the back door, sleds for hauling, a few coolers of food, an ash bucket, and kicksleds. Like I said, it's not pretty, but it works.