By Pyramid Hill

George Sugarman's "Cincinnati Story" came to Pyramid Hill from downtown. It looks better here than it ever did in front of the Chiquita Building.

Holiday lights are going up now at Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park, just outside Hamilton, and Harry Wilks' brown pickup has to swerve around the mobile crane as we tour the park. He's showing me what's new since the last time I was here and also giving me running commentary on what's in the works. Plenty is in the works. Wilks, for whom ideas never falter, is founder of and has the sole residence within this astonishing spread where art and nature commingle in the friendliest fashion. Although the park has grown into a public, nonprofit organization, it continues to occupy most of Wilks' time and attention.

The holiday lights will first turn on for the public on Nov. 19 and continue every evening, 6-10 p.m., through Jan. 1, including Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Eve. Car loads and even bus loads of spectators will wend along roads throughout the park's hilly terrain, with surprises at every turn from hundreds of thousands of lights illuminating holiday themes. The sculptures themselves are silent spectators to this nighttime seasonal extravagance, but in the autumn daylight they come into their own.

Looking fine is a piece I haven't seen before, "Melinda at the Beach" (Bill Barrett), which suggests a multiple exposure of a child in joyous action. Not far from "Melinda" is John Isherwood's great, somber "The Age of Stone," commissioned for the park and installed in 1998. "There is a value in permanence," Isherwood told me then. "People go to art for substance. Sculpture can realize a thought."

Fall is a spectacular time to visit Pyramid Hill. The turning color of the trees changes all the backgrounds, and once the leaves have fallen, new vistas appear. The road network, considerably extended since my last visit a few years ago, is augmented by pull-off points so that a journey through is as unhurried as the visitor pleases. Three hiking trails are well marked and traverse most areas of the park. For visitors drawn by the arboretum aspects of the place hiking is a welcome option, but bicyclists, motorcyclists and others of that ilk should forget it. The only non-automobile vehicles allowed are Art-Carts, for rent at the front gate. Some of these golf-cart derived transports have been decorated into truly "arty" carts, by groups such as a Hamilton High School class.

Rolling along the southernmost of the roadways we pass "Euclid's Cross" by Michael Dunbar, installed a year-and-a-half ago and new to me. It is massive but airy, an exercise in geometry that suggests the essential immutability of mathematics. "Twelve tons of bronze," says Wilks. "Twenty-one feet tall. You can drive an Art-Cart right through that opening in the bottom."

Farther on, a platform with a pretty little half-circle of columns stands on a level lawn among the trees, with a large, screened pavilion nearby. "Our new outdoor wedding chapel," Wilks says of the columns on the dais. Activity in the pavilion indicates a wedding today. Decorations going up include candles in glass jars hung from tree limbs, an almost sculptural gesture Wilks likes a lot.

The curving road climbs the edge of a hill, allowing views of a handsome, mortarless stone wall against the face of the rise below us. Pioneers who lived on the land and cultivated grape vines on the south-facing slope we are passing built the wall well over a century ago. "We uncovered it from honeysuckle and poison ivy, and now the hiking path to the pioneer spring goes alongside it," Wilks explains.

Pyramid Hill Park at first simply dazzles the eye with contemporary sculpture in a remarkable setting, but the history of the area turns up in the stone wall, the remains of a pioneer house with a barrel-vaulted stone ceiling and even in the glaciated rocks that sit like small sculptures themselves about the property. "Came down here from Canada ten thousand years ago and got left behind," says Wilks. "We use them to explain to the school children why we have gravel pits in this area."

We are passing now one of the terrific sightlines to "Abracadabra" (Alexander Liberman), an early and defining purchase for the park. The structure's great, curved shapes arc against the sky, seeming only briefly stilled, as though motion might begin again at any minute. Up above it, on the crest, George Sugarman's "Cincinnati Story," which came here when it was no longer wanted in front of downtown's Chiquita Building, looks better than it ever looked there.

We've passed small, level, grassy spaces jutting out from the hillside. They are pedestals waiting for sculptures because, Wilks says, "It takes a year or so for settling to take place." Elsewhere, waist-high yellow tape lines off a large site where work is about to begin on a building Wilks describes as "Roman villa on the outside, Renaissance inside." The Park's offices will move out from Hamilton, and his own collection of antique sculpture will leave his house to be shown here in public areas around a courtyard.

"I've wanted this building for a long time," says Wilks, then shows me where a grand staircase will rise from a parking lot, with a sculptural iron gate at the top opening to a garden. The new building will have a fine view of "Abracadabra," and somewhere nearby, he says, "I want a kinetic sculpture."

I haven't any doubt that these things will happen. All afternoon I've been looking at ideas of Harry Wilks that have come to pass.