It was a grey, misty day when we turned up the narrow road following the Takinoya River and headed for the Fudo Gorge. Our mission: magical maples.

The walk started under umbrellas. Fortunately, when the downpour came, we were close to a roofed, open-air picnic spot, and we could enjoy lunch there. By the time we’d finished eating, the rain had stopped.

Just as we’d planned.

Under a canopy of mist, the colors were lovely.   There was a maple-tree park at one bend of the river, and then, a couple of hundred meters downstream (maybe), a small temple—road level, but high above the river. All around the temple, maples leaned out over the river—and across the river, against a stone cliff, stood the gorge’s namesake, Fudo, the fiery, sword-wielding, “immovable” wisdom king. A god, if you will.

He wasn’t hiding. He was standing tall—and spewing fire, it appeared—but the shadows were tricky, and at first I didn’t see him—even though I was looking right across at where he was and there were no more than three hops and two skips between us.

Let that be a lesson to me. The gods protecting the gorges that host the maples are as solid and as real as stone–but they are not always discernible at a quick glance. You’ve got to be prepared to see them. You might have to look around a bit.

I’d been thinking that the colors in the mist were beautiful but that I’d like to see them in the bright sunshine too and that maybe coming twice was a good idea, when all of a sudden the sun came out.  The sky turned a magnificient blue. Just like that.

Wow. A single day. A double delight. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

It was lovely.

I mean, really, really lovely.

One maple leaf was so tickled with the way the day had turned out that it zoomed up into the sky and sailed high above the clouds. Way up above the clouds. See how small the clouds look down there?

Okay, okay, so that’s not the sky. It’s just the top of my Aqua. The leaf is just stuck on the roof of my car.

But Aqua was so tickled to have all those maple leafs surfing his surface, wishing they could fly . . . that he flung open his doors and tried to take off.

As you can see, I got my remote control whipped out just in time to switch off Aqua’s dare-to-fly switch. It’s not like me, I don’t think, to get in the way of someone else’s desire to take flight, but this time, I have to admit that my desire to get home before the day was done got the best of me. Forgive me.

There’s something magical about leaves piling up. I remember when I was a boy, raking up all the oak leaves in our yard. They were brown and not as lovely as these, but you’d be looking at that pile, and looking at that pile . . . and looking at that pile . . . and then you’d jump in. You just had to.

As I stood there feeding my eyes with these particular maple leaves, I suddenly found myself imagining an elementary school art room—one  with lots of slopjar-like buckets of paints, wallpaper-like rolls of white paper, dozens of hefty brushes, and a good twenty or twenty-five rowdy boys and girls.

The instructions are simple: There’s the paint. There’s the paper. There are the brushes. Fingers might do as well. Go.

An elementary school classroom with walls that display the artwork of each and every kid in the class is one of the most beautiful man-made spots on earth.

Sometimes, there’s a theme given. For example, paint your favorite animal. But one kid’s parrot may look like another’s giraffe. And line up all the fish created and you’re likely to have a rainbow. But somehow all the different kids’ shapes and colors come together to create one raucous, rollicking flow, and it all seems—the class’s work as one, the gestalt—so invigorating, so full of energy and zest.

Imagine you have six kids. And you have all these maple leaves. What you’ll want to do is keep the instructions simple: Hey, look at all these leaves. Go!

Here’s what I think you’ll get.

         

 Wah! Wonderful!  All the paintings are different but they look great together!

Hey, here’s an idea. Take all these leaves to school. Pile them up in the middle of the classroom. Give each kid two square meters of wall space. Say go.

You like to feel beauty in your life. Why wouldn’t you want them to in theirs?

So the kids fly into the big pile of leaves. Only a disbeliever will say it’s chaos.

But the result would be sublime. Almost anyone could tell you that.

Oh, sorry, Oliver, that’s not quite what I meant to say. What I do mean to say is that anyone with wide-awake and discerning eyes could tell you that those classroom walls would be sublime. Is that a better way of putting it, Oliver?

   

The maple park at Fudo Gorge is really a stone statue and maple park. These little guys are so cute and cuddly. They just look so darned round and comfortable and snuggle in under the maples in the most delightful manner. Makes you want to walk slow, to stay longer than maybe you’d planned. Notice how the one on the right proudly shows off a “charm point. “

The more abstract pieces snuggle in, too. They’re made just enough to make you marvel at how natural their position in the park seems to be.

You, too, will feel like snuggling in.

“But that’s just four rocks plopped down together! They’re shaved a bit, but it’s still just four rocks!”

If you feel like saying something like this . . . then why don’t you take the dare: Go find four rocks for yourself. Shave them a bit. Plop them down. See what you can do.

Or just forget about the stones if you don’t care for them. Just think about those elementary school students exploring the fallen leaves, discovering all sorts of patterns.

Exploring the leaves, delighting in the colors, discovering patterns, making patterns certainly seemed like enough joy for Ollie—he of the wide-awake and discerning eye.