Therein lies a cultural difference. To my taxi driver, and to all Finns, sauna is tantamount to goodness. In fact, an old Finnish saying goes, “One is to be in the sauna as one is to be in church.” I guess I’d just attempted to ask her to turn down the church in here.

I come from another sensibility around heat, the one that uses sauna in the pejorative. I decry any noticeable temperature, and I come by it naturally. Physiologically. I’m a blind guy. Denuded of sight, my body is left more sensitive, subjectively overexposed, to other stimuli. Heat is among the more intolerable. To me, it is neither relaxing nor revitalizing. To me heat is crowding and oppressive, like someone shouting in my ear. Worse, it induces claustrophobia, the kind a sighted person might feel if someone were to get up in his face and wave jazz-hands. Heat has no sense of personal space. If the sauna is like church, then I say someone should open a goddamned window in here.

Photo by Max Sher

Photo by Max Sher

Photo by Max Sher

Photo by Max Sher

But I wondered if I could learn to feel heat differently. Could I acclimate to it through a new cultural context? Maybe with some tutored appreciation? How could the entire Finnish nation, and more than nine centuries of unanimous sauna-love, be wrong? Typical blind-guy stuff—I just want to be like everyone else. Besides, a few days in 2012’s design capital of the world would let my body put Helsinki’s vaunted livability to the test.On my first morning, I asked the hotel clerk, Jusa, what I might do while in town. He and his colleagues debated in Finnish, which, if you’ve never heard the language, sounds something like a drunken Berliner confusing Danish with Italian.“Sauna,” was the conclusion, confirming my mission.But not just any of the public saunas that dot the city. Some are overtly modern in sensibility, equipped with electric heaters instead of traditional stoves. Others champion a dry heat generated by an infrared gizmo—a Star Trek sauna. One sauna still burns wood, old-school style, adding an olfactory dimension to the experience, Jusa explained, assuring that he would find the right one for me. I gave him a day to research.Luckily for me, the city was in the middle of its annual Herring Festival. Boat after boat had anchored ashore from the Baltic. Lapland lake fisherfolk had set up kiosks in a public market near Esplanadi Park, at the edge of the sea. All I had to do was leave the hotel, turn left, and walk until I found the water. Without getting run over. Or drowned. Or lost.It should take about 20 minutes to get there, Jusa said.So I walked.This is as frightening to me as it is ordinary to you. Hoofing it unguided through an unknown city when you’re blind is an exercise in will and recklessness. Is this a curb? An intersection? Is there a light? Am I in the street? Necessity demanded I count my steps from the hotel to the first corner (158), then tally blocks as I went, lefts and rights, building a shaky mental map and generating mathematical breadcrumbs. One mistake on my return could set me off wandering for hours.Within a block down Lönnrotinkatu—katu meaning “street”—only two observations cut through my terror. First, Helsinki’s light was gorgeous. My eyes can’t discern images, but they’re beyond light sensitive. Even a fluorescent bulb hurts. But here, the glare was a soft sodium glow, like a gauze that bandaged the sky. Then, at my first intersection, came an incredible relief. The zebra crossings were a marvel. So bold and large, and in such contrast to the street, that I could actually see them through the Vaseline-like blur of my retinas. I saw. It was exotic. They sure make terrific crosswalks in Helsinki. Take a bow, design capital.The Herring Festival did eventually appear. It took more than an hour for me to walk there, six blocks, one dogleg to the right around a department store where people kept asking me if I was looking for the Crazy Days sale, another four blocks, and a 323-step meander through a slender urban park. Then I heard it. The city’s quiet gave way to a clustered bustle. A crowd thickened, then swamped me. There was sizzling, the shouts of hawkers, and the smell of salt water and fish oil. I simply bumped into a kiosk, the first boxy shadow I could find, and asked the void what I could eat. Hopefully it wasn’t selling bait.In my hand landed a paper plate stacked high with small, garlicky bites. “Muikku,” the fisherman said. Tiny lake fish fried in a coating of batter and paprika. I ate dozens and dozens. In the chill October air, their warmth, their oily crispness were so satisfying, so bracing from the inside out. For days I would smell them on my hands, reminding me I was in Finland whenever I scratched my chin or sipped my coffee.From previous research I knew that a short ferry ride from the market where I was licking muikku grease from my thumbs could take me to Suomenlinna , Finland’s famed UNESCO World Heritage site, an island fortress built to ward off naval assaults from invading Russian fleets. Today, Suomenlinna is a cluster of tiny islands where Finns enjoy a walk, a winter’s swim, or the summer sun. A dip, I thought. I’d dare to wade into the frigid, dark Baltic.Tap, tap, my white cane cleared a path to the market’s end, where a shopper asked if I was looking for the ferry terminal. She ushered me inside a small dockside waiting room, where I waited. And waited. Nobody from the ferry came. No announcements came, either. You’d think in the design capital of the world there’d be, you know, something. A desk. A person. A bell or a flare gun.I heard a couple of customers enter and take a seat next to me. When I asked how to buy tickets, they explained something in Japanese. After a nod and a smile of thanks, I resumed the passivity of my total ignorance. I would just have to shadow close behind, like a needy little brother. The moment they left to board the ferry, I raced after them, tapping across the concrete, chasing the click of their footsteps, until finally they opened a door.We were crowding together, it seems, into their car.It must have made them a bit nervous, this large, tattooed, blind Canadian man imposing himself on their car pool. So I just smiled meekly and waved good-bye, as if I’d been their valet. Seems they’d given up on the ferry. I gave up, too, and counted my breadcrumbs home, feeling somewhat shunned by this quiet city.Back at the hotel, Jusa was still on the sauna case. In the meantime, I decided I would eat my way back to a sense of place. Muikku had been my closest contact with Finland so far. Restaurants can, if I’m lucky, orient me to a city better than any map. Dinner that night at Spis was beyond playful, peeking and hiding from recognition. A salad arrived first, consisting of onions and onions alone. Some of them had a texture and acidity that made me mistake them for tomatoes. Others were as sweet as fruit. My entrée was a dish of wild hare, which the waitress warned me to chew carefully in case of remaining “shots.” Every bite was a lethally tinged thrill, though I failed to chip a tooth. Then, after a warm strudel with potatoes that had marinated to disguise themselves as apples, I enjoyed a small dessert. The whole evening had begun with an inconspicuous amuse-bouche of borscht and sour cream. And now, here it was again, returning, this time sweetened to a candylike broth, dressed in a whipped cream that had once been sour. So much disguise and surprise. So much pleasure in losing track of what is actually what. Like being a blind traveler.The next morning Jusa presented me with a few pages he’d printed from the web. They were directions to my sauna, for the benefit of my cabdriver. This one, Jusa told me, offered a cooling swim as well as a variety of rooms at different temperatures. It even had savusaunas, or “smoke saunas,” perhaps the oldest style of leisure. The smoke from a stove is collected in the room, then vented, leaving a strong campfire haze, an olfactory balm to complement your cloak of warmth. I had only expected to be hot. Now heat had a lengthy custom menu of pleasures.He did make his way to the sauna at Lake Kuusijärvi.Jusa’s colleague, a young, chirpy clerk, posed me a last question before I left the hotel.“You have strong heart, yes?”“I think so.”“Not so good if you don’t have strong heart. People they sometimes...”Her English left her. I imagined, however, that she clutched at her chest to mime “massive coronary.”The taxi ride took nearly an hour, winding me into what felt like foothills. The only notable landmark I passed, according to the driver, was Ikea. As our car rose and turned and wound, I mentioned how quiet, how elusive, I found Helsinki. The driver agreed, albeit quietly. It is not in the Finnish character, he explained, to create a spectacle. Good design does make itself invisible, I supposed. The better things work, the less noise, the less friction.We arrived. When I stepped out of the cab, all signs of the city were gone. The air had chilled further, and the sour hint of the sea had given way to the perfume of a mountain forest. Beyond the breeze, I couldn’t hear a sound. Except the sound of my taxi leaving me behind. On a mountain.Without a taxi stand. Or a clue.I tapped my cane along a path until I hit a tree, then another, and eventually a building. A bit of groping revealed a door. And beyond that door, a reception desk.“Sauna?” the receptionist asked. “Or sauna and swim?”“Is there a pool?”“Lake.”The lake that day, she said, was six degrees above freezing. Enough to induce a decent heart attack.She handed me a towel and, I think, pointed to the men’s changing room.“Can you guide me?” I asked.But she couldn’t. And her blush was audible. I would be naked. And so would the other men. Only women were on staff today. I was on my own.At this point I was tired of being on my own, of bumping about the design capital of the world like a mouse in a maze. But I’d come all this way, and the lake and the heat promised something a blind man could experience the way everybody else can. So once again I pinballed into the void, this time down the lodge’s hallway, feeling for a hot door, or a naked man.