Yesterday being a celebratory day for us, and with late October breaking out into a preposterous riot of color, we found ourselves someplace we'd heard a lot about but had never been, up the river a ways at Storm King. My sorrow at having no currently working digital camera should be balanced by your happiness at not having to squint at a lot of badly-framed shots of outdoor sculpture here.

A Google search turned up some shots by another visitor which, on the whole, are better than anything I'd have been likely to provide -- and as impressive, sadly, as any of the images you'll find on the organization's official site.

But Mr. Kleinfeld wasn't there at the right time of year, I think -- this weekend the Calders framed trees that looked as if they'd been colored in with yellow highlighters, and from the Noguchi sculpture which presides over Storm King's central hillock, the wooded slopes were daubed in deep ochres and carrot oranges, while the lawns, upon which various titantic whimsies preened themselves, were still a determined green, holding on to summer's chlorophyll binge with an appealing desperation.

Would it be too much to say that the great trick of all of the sculpture is to pull something of a Wallace Stevens on you? Although the landscape is no longer a wilderness, and was probably never slovenly, the balancing act of works like Kadishman's "Suspended" makes you look again at all of the "natural" beauty it's set in with a pleasant suspicion; you drive off a little uneasy about those picturesque stones on that ridgeline, and happily alive to the possible double-dealing in a row of nonchalant trees.