he says in retrospect. 'And rather than a square stairway, I should've done a circular stairway. I should've taken the time to make a masonry stairway. There's one book. It's a large book, it's called The History of the British House, and it goes into windows, doors, ironwork, how the doors were made… I didn't have that book before I started. Had I had that book, I would've done a lot of things differently. And I would've taken more time.'
And a little more money… 'The truth of the matter is,' he says, 'a lot of the stuff I put in the house, since it was just for myself, I didn't go to first-line stuff.'
He wishes he'd dug a moat around the castle.
He wants to put a new surface of crushed oyster shell on the bocci ball court.
And the naked mannequin that overlooks the river from a bedroom balcony, well, her fiberglass skin is cracked and faded. 'I was going to take her to Portland,' Bob says, 'and get a boob job for her.'
Soon enough, all those details won't matter. Because this year Bob's selling the place. For the next owner, the good news is that eight or nine local contractors know Bob's place inside and out. 'The bathrooms are all stacked,' he says. 'And there are guys around here, who live in Hood River, who worked on this house, did the plumbing and electricity and know it all. They're avid windsurfers, so they're not going anywhere.'
Neither are the countless birds or the river. Or his castle. Or the stories, the local legends about it.
Whether castle building is a bid for immortality or a hobby-a «fun» way to kill time-whether it's a gift to the future or a memorial to the past, in the hills above Camas, Washington, Jerry Bjorklund's castle is still the landmark where jetliners know to turn. In the mountains of Idaho, skiers still discover Roger DeClements's Castle Kataryna, a monument to his daughter. A vision in the snow. Just like the castle so many people have always dreamed of building.
Their own confession in stone. Their memoir.
In the valley of the White Salmon River, the water still rushes past the tall gray tower. The wind and the birds still move between the trees. Even if a forest fire sweeps through, for the next hundred years this pile of stone will still stand here.
Only Bob Nippolt is leaving.
For now, all three castles remain unfinished.
Frontiers
'If everybody jumped off a cliff,' my father used to say, 'would you?'
This was a few years ago. It was the summer a wild cougar killed a jogger in Sacramento. The summer my doctor wouldn't give me anabolic steroids.
A local supermarket used to offer this special deal: if you brought in fifty bucks' worth of receipts, you could buy a dozen eggs for a dime, so my best friends, Ed and Bill, used to stand in the parking lot asking people for their receipts. Ed and Bill, they ate blocks of frozen egg white, ten-pound blocks they got at a bakery supply house, egg albumen being the most easily assimilated protein.
Ed and Bill used to make these road trips to San Diego, then cross the border on foot at Tijuana with the rest of the gringo day-trippers to buy their steroids, their Dianabol, and smuggle it back.
This must've been the summer the DEA had other priorities.
Ed and Bill are not their real names.
We were road-tripping down through California, and we stopped in Sacramento to visit some friends, except nobody was home. We waited a whole afternoon beside their pool. Ed's bleached crew cut was growing out, so he leaned over the edge of their deck and asked me to just shave his head.
At this point the cougar was still running wild. This was the countryside, but not. The wilderness platted into 2.5-acre mini-estates. Somewhere was a female cougar with cubs, squeezed in among the soccer moms and swimming pools.
This was less of a vacation than a pilgrimage from one Gold's Gym franchise to the next along the West Coast. On the road, we bought water-packed tuna and ate it dry, tossing the empty cans in the backseat. We washed it down with diet soda and farted the length of Interstate 5.
Ed and Bill shot preloaded syringes of D-ball, and I did everything else. Arginine, ornithine, smilax, Inosine, DHEA, saw palmetto, selenium, chromium, free-range New Zealand sheep testicle, Vanadyl, orchid extract…
At the gym, while my friends bench-pressed three times their body weight, pumping up, shredding their clothes from the inside, I'd hover around their giant elbows.
'You know,' I'd say, 'I think I'm putting on some real size with this yohimbe bark tincture.'
Yeah, that summer.
The only reason they let me hover was for contrast.
It's the old strategy of choosing ugly bridesmaids so the bride looks better.
Mirrors are only the methadone of bodybuilding. You need a real audience. There's that joke: How many bodybuilders does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Three-one to screw in the bulb and two to say, 'Really, dude, you look massive!'
Yeah, that joke. It's not really a joke.
The Sacramento people we tried to visit, on our way home from Mexico we stopped by their house again. They were throwing a barbecue for some friends who'd been away at a men's retreat.
On this retreat, somebody explained, each man was sent out into the desert to wander until he had a revelation. Now while the tiki torches flickered and the propane barbecue smoked, one man stood clutching some kind of shriveled baseball bat. It was the desiccated skeleton of a dead cactus he'd found on his vision quest, but it was more.
'I realized,' he said, 'that this cactus skeleton was me. This was my manhood, abrasive and hard on the outside, but brittle and hollow.'
He'd brought the skeleton home on the airplane, in his lap.
Everybody else around the deck closed their eyes and nodded. Except my friends, who turned the other way with their jaws clenched to keep from laughing. Their huge arms folded across their chests, they elbowed each other and wanted to walk up the road to see some historical rock.
The hostess stopped us at the gate and said, 'Don't! Just don't.'
Clutching her wine cooler and looking into the darkness beyond the steam of the whirlpool and the light of the tiki torches, not looking at us, she said a cougar had been prowling around. The cougar had been right up next to their deck, and she showed us in the shrubs a scattering of short, coarse, blond hair.
That year, everywhere we drove, that whole trip, there were already fences and property lines and names on everything.
Ed juiced and lifted for a couple more years until he blew out his knees. Bill, until he ruptured a disk in his back.
It wasn't until last year, when my father died, that my doctor finally came across. I lost weight and kept losing weight until he whipped out his prescription pad and said, 'Let's try you on thirty days of Anadrol.'
So I jumped off the cliff, too.
People squinted at me and asked what was different. My arms got a little bigger around, but not that much. More than the size, the feeling was enough. I stood straight, my shoulders squared.
According to the package insert, Anadrol (oxymetholone) is an anabolic steroid, a synthetic derivative of testosterone. Possible side effects include: testicular atrophy, impotence, chronic priapism, increased or decreased libido, insomnia, and hair loss. One hundred tablets cost eleven hundred bucks. Insurance does not cover it.
But the feeling. Your eyes are popped open and alert. The way women look so good when they're pregnant, glowing and soft and so much more female-Anadrol makes you look and feel that much more male. The raging priapism part, that was the first couple weeks. You are nothing but the real estate between your legs. It's the same as those old illustrations in Alice in Wonderland, where she's eaten the cake marked 'Eat Me' and grown until her arm sticks out the front door. Except it's not your arm that sticks out, and wearing Spandex bicycle pants is totally out of the question.
About the third week, the priapism subsided, or seemed to spread to my entire body. Weight lifting gets better than sex. A workout becomes an orgy. You're having orgasms-cramping, hot, rushing orgasms in your delts,
