I didn’t know it was possible to play a four-stringed guitar and sing all while swinging in a hammock, but then again, Rodolfo Palencia is a man of many talents.

He’s got a ranch with cattle. A degree in criminology. A book to his name (on corruption) and a second (on the world’s rising population) that’s in manuscript form.

There’s the volume of poetry that he penned, the CDs that he recorded. And he has plans for a political career in Sabaneta, former President Hugo Chávez’s hometown in Barinas State, where he wants to challenge loyalists of Mr. Chávez.

As I wrap up this notebook, it’s Rodolfo who comes into focus as one of the great minds I encountered during my first 30 days in this country. He is a Leonardo da Vinci camped out in the Venezuelan plains, the kind of polymath who embodies the spirit of the place.

Rodolfo appears in the last scene of an article I wrote about a four-day road trip across the country with a photographer, Meridith Kohut. It was the final day of the trip, and we stumbled into an idle factory that was supposed to produce feed to support the region’s dying fish farming industry.

It was a towering place, and we had it all to ourselves. Expensive equipment was everywhere, never used. Now just a pile of waste.

I’d gone up the staircase with Meridith, and when we came down, a watchman had suddenly appeared. We expected him to be angry. But instead, it was Rodolfo who was.

“You aren’t even watching over the equipment,” Rodolfo said. “You do nothing.”

The anger in his voice will be hard to forget. It seemed to be directed at all that was going wrong here, as well as the struggle to find someone to blame in a country whose economic bottom had fallen out, leaving it spinning out of control.

But I wish now that there had been space in that story to say more about Rodolfo, and how he also represents what is right in Venezuela.

Soon, Rodolfo plans to run for political office, possibly with Voluntad Popular, one of the opposition parties that have taken charge of the National Assembly to challenge the leftists who have controlled the country for years.

Mr. Chávez’s heirs seem eager to meet the opposition’s challenge. There’s talk of revisiting old paradigms, like the model of a petrostate, and there are faces rising in their ranks whose rhetoric is more conciliatory than that of their predecessors.

And they’re open to things they weren’t before — such as meeting foreign correspondents like me.

Many readers have asked me if I see things getting better in Venezuela. I don’t always know how to answer.

People here say that things will get worse before they get better, and I realize that I will be spending much of the year documenting the slow and depressing sinking of Venezuelan society.

But I also know that it’s the times that are the worst that bring out the best in those living through them. I’m looking forward to more visits to see Rodolfo Palencia in Sabaneta and to hear the new songs that he has worked up on his guitar.

There’s one that I can’t get out of my head, a song about a broken heart that was on the recording he gave me when I saw him in the plains last month: