The outcropping of granite rock rises some thirty feet above the marsh and has a diameter across the top of seventy-five to a hundred feet. On cold winter days you can hunker down near the top of the protected south side of the rock, and even though the winter sun draws a low arc across the south horizon, the sun warms you on Brunhilde's rock.

The landscape visible to the south of Brunhilde's rock is grassy marsh extending east and west...A small stream meanders the length of the marsh. In the winter the indentations of our snowshoe trail are visible along the frozen course of the stream.... I turn and face the north side...a shear drop thirty feet down to the forest floor where anemone and star flowers blossom beneath pine and spruce trees....

A purple finch, proudly decked for mating, sits in the tip top of a spruce and serenades me beautifully.... For nearly three decades I walked the woodlands of northeastern Minnesota and paddled across its waters, and more and more I wanted to claim this landscape as my own. So I bought a piece of land, and now here I sit on Brunhilde's Rock. I have paid my money and it is mine.

On a mid-summer's day I sit imbibing the scene; there seem to be others on my rock, and they are laughing at me. The forest has grown much older. The one hundred-year old white pines scattered among the red pines are yearlings in comparison to the mammoth whites spreading their branches across the sky of my mind's eye....

The ethereal presences sharing my rock take shape in my mind. They are clothed in skins and have the look of Native Americans....Their laughter increases as they mouth the clumsy word "Brunhilde.".... It floats from their mouths and bobbles ridiculously in the air.... They contemptuously spit out the alien word I have given their rock, their landscape, and turn and pay homage to the bear walking below....

From "the View From Brunhilde's Rock: Envisioning a Landscape," End of the Road Reader, (Northwoods Writers Guild)