A Sauna, a Hole in the Ice and Three Old Friends

Three of my oldest friends and I have a tradition. Every February, we drive up to a cabin on a frozen lake in northern Minnesota with a wood-fired sauna on the shore. We've been doing it for twenty-two years.

The ritual is always the same. Heat the sauna until it's almost unbearable. Sit in the dark, sweating and talking about our lives. Then run out the door, across the snow in bare feet, and jump into a hole we've cut in the ice.

The cold is impossible to describe. Your whole body yells. You come up gasping and laughing. Then you run back to the sauna, and the heat feels like heaven.

We did it six times on Saturday night, under a sky full of stars, with the temperature at minus eight. We're all in our fifties now. Somebody's knees hurt. Somebody's hair is gone. But when we're standing in the snow, steaming like kettles and howling at the moon, we're twenty-five again.