With this story, it seems to us, Wenzl and his editors (Polly Basore, Kevin McGrath and Marcia Werts) took a gamble. Would people read a story about a ranch? About a family trying to save it? Turns out Wenzl had writer’s luck: He discovered a compelling dramatic complication—an estranged son—and witnessed its resolution.
Wenzl evokes the place well, in particular with his recurring use of the phrase “sunlight and grass and water.” He structures the piece handily: He begins at the moment when the bitter son returns home, setting up the complication. Then Wenzl steps back 150 years, to the beginning of the family legend. He alternates between that history and the more recent story until the two threads merge in the final installment. It’s “a structural architecture I borrowed from John McPhee’s ‘Rising from the Plains,’ ” Wenzl wrote in an e-mail to us.
In that last installment, the estranged son returns to the ranch and helps make repairs. He appears to readers to have reconciled, at least to a degree, with his family. His family “looked at what he did with surprise and relief, and even a small measure of hope.” We were gladdened by this next writerly aside: “False hope, maybe. Americans are suckers for happy endings.” Wenzl shows some narrative resolution but leaves room for the complicated plots of real life and good fiction.
