LITTLE AND OFTEN

A prodigal son’s homecoming, just in the nick of time.

Preszler left home on a South Dakota ranch as soon as he could, earning a doctorate in plant science and finding work as an oenologist in New York. Things come tumbling down quickly in this fine memoir. Summoned to his remote hometown—so remote, as measured by geographers, that it boasts the greatest distance from a McDonald’s in the continental U.S.—to attend to a rough-edged father, a former rodeo star, who was dying of cancer, he found surprising moments of reconciliation. His father, to his astonishment, asked him about his boyfriend. “I was shocked,” Preszler writes. “In my thirty-seven years, my father had never asked me about a relationship of any kind, with men or women, romantic or platonic.” When the author expressed further shock at this gesture of sympathy, his father gently replied, “If my son is hurtin’ I oughta know.” After his father died, Preszler inherited a toolbox full of implements he didn’t know how to use. Seeking simplicity, he emptied his house of all its “materialistic clutter.” “The only things of sentimental value I saved,” he writes, “were my father’s toolbox, the taxidermied duck, and some old family photo albums.” In the place of the former furnishings came sawhorses and piles of lumber. Working with each tool in its place and learning as he went along, he handcrafted a canoe. Childhood pains, the romantic heartbreaks of early adulthood, the devastation of forested places due to climate change: All come under scrutiny as Preszler movingly chronicles his single-minded pursuit to build something that “contained every scrap of love that I had ever lost or found.” Thanks to his labors and self-education, the author not only found reconciliation with the past, but also emerged as a fine boatbuilder whose work is prized by collectors today.

Woodworking meets bridge-building, and sorrow meets understanding in this impeccably written, loving memoir.