You don’t need a snowstorm to appreciate a sauna, but it helps. You don’t even need to leave your property. As the most recent winter storm (Benjamin, was it?) closed in on Connecticut, Brian Hornby, owner of Steam City Sauna, set up a wood-fired tent sauna in my own backyard.
Hornby fell in love with sauna as a way to promote “connection, reflection, and renewal.” For me and my friends, it was a party, one that left me feeling calm, recharged, euphoric, even—and not hungover. When Hornby first sought sauna in New Haven, he got his fix at a local community center, but after a few too many scolding emails between the proprietor and those who like it hot, he bought his own portable sauna and left the temperature wars behind.
Looking to spread the gospel, he started Steam City Sauna as a festival booth with a sauna and cold plunge, before pivoting to a more flexible and accessible rental model. In addition to private engagements, Steam City has hosted a public sauna day in Edgerton Park. Hornby’s own yard, which is along the route of the New Haven Road Race, has offered runners a post-race recovery regimen of alternating sauna and cold plunge. By Hornby’s assessment, New Haven may not be a city that has everything, but it is a place where you can start anything. “There’s an openness to new experiences.”
Steam City’s wood-fired sauna is $75 a day for weekdays and $95 for weekends, with a two-day minimum. Set up requires a flat 12x12-foot space. Twenty minutes after Brian arrived, I stepped into my backyard to find the whole thing in place, including an easy-to-use stove, plenty of wood and kindling, a bucket and ladle, lantern, gloves, a partial parquet floor and tiered wooden benches. (The stove didn’t put out enough smoke to irritate neighbors.) A cold plunge is available for $45 a day, plus a bit more if you add the chiller and filter accessories that might be necessary in warmer weather. The customer provides water and ice for the cold plunge, so you’ll need a hose and, if using the chiller, access to electricity.
The headline on the website is “connect and recover.” That means recovery from physical soreness, but also from the spiritual malaise of screen-based living. On top of possible benefits for flexibility, blood pressure and circulation, the sauna demands you set aside your device (your Apple Watch will quickly send you a distress signal if you don’t), leaving you no choice but to check in with (a) yourself and (b) the people you invited to join you, if you did. Renting the sauna for two days allowed us to do both: Saturday for neighbors to stop by, Sunday for family snow-watching.
The New York Times recently ran an article listing the ways Americans are misinterpreting sauna culture, what with our bathing (not birthday) suits and integrated workouts and general tendency to see sauna as part of an extreme wellness regimen rather than a carefree communal activity. Americans, this argument implies, can’t stop working toward victory, personal or otherwise. But you can’t win sauna.
Point taken, but if I’m inviting my neighbors over for a novel experience, the dress code isn’t going to be clothing-optional. This is New England, after all. A lot of our ghosts are Puritans.
We had planned to use the cold plunge, but it seemed redundant in the weather. When you leave your pocket of 160 degrees and go into a negative wind chill, steam rises from your skin the second you exit the tent flap. While it isn’t necessary to roll in the snow after a session, those of us who did felt crazed and invigorated. The heart pounds and the vocalizations, ranging from shrieks to guffaws, are involuntary. Footwear isn’t an unreasonable move, as the toes are the first body part to remind you that a foot of snow is not primarily a life-giving force. Still, these extremes show us that there is more to life than our comfort zone.
During our Saturday open house, people took turns; the sauna comfortably holds six, eight with less personal space. We chatted about the coming storm and occasionally spiked the temperature and humidity by pouring a ladle of water on the hot rocks atop the stove. When people were rotating out of the sauna, they sipped Athletics (and a few Two Roads, though alcohol is not recommended given the dehydration factor) and shared snacks and news. Not everyone who stopped by availed themselves of the sauna, but it made an excellent excuse to see people.
Sunday was a different story. As the whole city hunkered down, I stretched out on the top tier of the popup bleachers and looked up through the sauna’s ceiling window at the infinite spiral of Benjamin’s snowflakes. The world was churning, but for a brief pocket of time there was only sauna, with nowhere else to go and nothing I could win.
Written and photographed by Sarah Harris Wallman.
