Prairie Lite…

By Carla Kelly

Sometimes, the general craziness of life on this planet just leaves me reaching for a computer so I can write a column.
It happened recently when I read an article about officials in seven states getting together to talk about strategies to keep deer off highways.
What they want to do is put predator urine in cans off the roads, on the theory that deer thinking about crossing I-Whatever would get a whiff and back away from all those tempting Toyotas and Saturns waiting to be destroyed.
Maybe I was still tired. Maybe I left conditioner on my head too long in the shower. For the life of me, all I could wrap my mind around was some hapless employee in the highway department trying to coax wolves and bears to pee into cans.
That would be the worst job in the world. Thank goodness Congress is thinking about raising the minimum wage. I can’t imagine anyone doing that for $5.15 an hour, not even for a summer job.
Still shaking my head, I turned next to an article about a Norwegian cruise ship stranded in Antarctica.
Maybe I’ve lived in North Dakota’s chill factory too long, but who would be nuts enough to pay to go somewhere that cold on vacation? They deserve to get stranded in Antarctica. In their skivvies and bare feet. Cry me a river.
Then I started thinking about the people I wish would get stranded in Antarctica. I won’t name them until we retire and leave here in two years. It’s not a lengthy list, but it is heart-felt.
Speaking of hearts, did you know Dracula’s castle is for sale? And just in time for Valentine’s Day? The family that owns Vlad the Impaler’s house is trying to unload it for $78 million.
Talk about your fixer-upper: It doesn’t have heat, electricity or plumbing – just bats swooping around, and probably some wooden stakes in a corner.
Bran Castle belong to some Hapsburgs. Anyone remember than name from European history? Anyone? Anyone?
In 1948, the castle fell into communist hands when those bad boys moved into Romania. Last spring, during what was called “the restitution,” the castle was given back to New Yorker Dominic Hapsburg, a descendant of the princess forced to give it up in 1948.
Now the family wants to sell it. That sticker price makes me think Dracula is still drinking people’s blood.
Romania wants to buy the castle because officials fear someone else who buys it might want to turn it into a Dracula theme park.
I shouldn’t read this stuff over breakfast. It makes me want to crawl back in bed and pull the blankets over my head.
About the same time Dracula’s castle went on sale for $78 million, came this article about a 77-square-feet storage room in London’s exclusive Knightsbridge area on the market for $335,000.
There’s no heat or electricity, either, and the shower is described as “coffin-sized.” The apartment is dark and mildewed. The kitchen is two hot plates and a sink.
The realtor already has three offers for the place. Are people nuts? No address is exclusive enough to risk insanity by claustrophobia, just by taking a shower.
Two hundred years ago this year, poet William Wordsworth must have read one too many weird stories in his newspaper. In my case, it turned into a half-baked column. In Wordsworth’s case, it was a world-class sonnet beginning this way:
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”
From what Wordsworth writes next, he is apparently standing in a meadow, where he has “glimpses that would make me less forlorn.”
I get that same “less forlorn” feeling in Niobrara County, in the barely inhabited tall grass country of eastern Wyoming. You can see forever in Niobrara County, home to Rawhide Buttes, hawks, and a bunch of ranchers working hard to keep the wolf from the door.
Wolves. They’re about to go off the endangered species list, probably to be replaced by ranchers. The wolves can go to work for the highway department, peeing in cans.
Things are getting crazy. I need to hear some geese overhead about now.