A bead of sweat tickles behind my ear. It goes down my jaw, into my hair. I feel my breath – I really feel it, hot, roasting my throat. My heart thumps and thumps and thumps in my chest, and at first it panics: it squirms in my ribcage, a lobster in a pot. And then, he settles into his metronome tic. I suddenly feel my whole body, the blood circulating in my currents, this heart trembling.

On this March evening, I sit in a metal trailer, parked along the Deschutes in Bend. In the corner is a small wood stove, crowned with sizzling, steaming rocks. Halina Kowalski-Thompson, the owner of Bringing together the sauna house in central Oregon, holds sessions here. Today it’s 195 degrees Fahrenheit inside the sauna. It’s 47 degrees outside. It’s about 42 degrees in the river. That’s where we’re heading next. As we submerge our bodies in the water, my lungs seem to forget how to breathe. I have to remind them, slowly, through my nostrils. I count to myself, waiting for my brain to relax. And then, after turning over our towels, we sit down. Kowalski-Thompson tells us to resist the urge to dull rumbles of discomfort with neutral heat. I let the tremors flare up and then dissipate. I feel the droplets evaporating from my arms. My skin, my brain, my whole body feels like it’s vibrating.

For Kowalski-Thompson, the most magical part of a sauna isn’t actually In the sauna, or the breathtaking step in a river: it’s that next moment, sitting in nature, feeling alive. “You let that feeling take over you,” she says. “You see the birds flying above you and you can hear their feathers. You are that gift.

Saunas, and their many relatives, have been around for millennia – by current estimates, approximately 10,000 years. In Finland, people dug pits in the ground, laid stones at the base and warmed them with campfires – just to spoil the flame with soggy peat, steam and smoke filling the surrounding hut. They would follow their sauna with a dip in the Baltic Sea or another invigorating body of water, a way to cool off and wash away soot and sweat. These were sacred spaces, mixed with folklore. “The pre-Christian Finns had this harvest festival called Kekri, and there was a kind of Day of the Dead,” says Andrew Nestingen, chair of the Scandinavian studies department at the University of Washington. “(The dead) would come back and they would warm up the sauna for them.”

Thousands of miles away, in what we today call the Pacific Northwest, the Kalapuya built similar structures, often called sweathouses or sweat lodges; they heated stones in a fire outside a hut built into the ground, where the men smoked together. Many tribes in the greater region, including the Klamath, Takelma, and Nez Perce, had their own distinct sweat lodge traditions and structures; most involved stones heated over a fire, doused with water to create steam.

Much later, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Finnish immigrants settled in Oregon, notably Astoria, bringing with them their specific sauna culture. Around the same time, public baths and steam rooms began to emerge in earnest in downtown Portland and Astoria’s Uniontown neighborhood, places where Oregonians bathed, sweated, steamed and were gathering. Here as in Finland, saunas were an essential community meeting place. “Without modern plumbing, it was a place where you had to clean yourself,” Nestingen says. “People are born in saunas; corpses were washed in saunas. The sauna has a pretty important place in the phases of life, and socialization is an important part of it.

Oregon, of course, is a rainy state that has long loved a figurative (or literal?) hot spot. However, most residents have still flocked to warm areas. springs, places like Kah-Nee-Ta, BreitenbushAnd Terwilliger. Sauna culture isn’t as established here as it is in places like Minnesota. But that’s changing in the Pacific Northwest: Newly opened sauna gardens and spas have made the cedar bench the main event, as opposed to an afterthought next to a swimming pool. hotel or a deep bathtub.

These original smoke saunas, sweat houses and bathhouses are a far cry from the infrared suites and eucalyptus-scented steam rooms that have spread across the world in recent times. In the Portland area alone, rent your own sauna studios like SweatHouz And Pure sweat have emerged, as residents invest in backyard barrel saunas and Everett House visits. Luxury spa and contrast therapy palace Knot Springswhich opened in 2016, completely sold out its memberships in early 2023; there is now a waiting list of 800 people. And the variety of hot spring bath options seems to be growing in Portland: the much-anticipated Cascadean underground hotel and spa on NE Alberta Street, is home to what is claimed to be Portland’s largest hydrothermal spa, and memberships were sold out before the venue even opened. And Nordstrom alumna Sadie Voeks is working to open Portland’s first official hammam, Harara.

Kowalski-Thompson attributes the growing interest in sauna experiences in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, both in the way it has forced people to consider their precarious physical health and in the way people were isolated. “Because of COVID, people have had to slow down,” she says. “They were thinking about health, they were looking for new ways (to be healthy).… We’re entering a stage where people are looking for healthy places to connect that aren’t bars.”

The culture within saunas varies greatly. Some are silent and meditative places to feel present in your body, to delight in the deafening beat of your heart. Some are chatty social clubs where Portlanders, naked or nearly naked, strike up a conversation in the steam. Some are wellness-focused and borderline clinical, where staff extol the physical and mental benefits of sauna or contrast therapy while accompanying you in a private space. And others fall somewhere in between. What they all offer, including those quirky bathhouses or smoke saunas, is the ability to be in your body, in the moment.

Two years after that first riverside shvitz, I found myself in a bathhouse 113 miles away at outdoor brand Snow Peak’s chic campground in Long Beach, Washington. . That evening, young Portland couples, contrast therapy enthusiasts equipped with heat-resistant stopwatches, and extroverted Californians who had never fucked before all gathered in his cypress-lined sauna. Outside the secluded door, a group of children, all under the age of 10, crowded around the cold pool of the baths, counting in unison as each of them shivered and grimaced in their depths. Their parents watched from the sauna bench and we laughed inside. It was not a serene, serious space; It’s very good. We could all count together, remembering how to breathe.