The beams came from a bankruptcy sale. The steel roof came from an old Standard Oil building being torn down. The bathroom vanities are antique dressers with a hole cut in the top for a recessed sink. The bar is from the old East Ave Tavern in Portland, Oregon. All the insulation he got for free from a Safeway supermarket being remodeled.
Like Roger's castle, the windows and doors are pointed Gothic arches-including a tall stained-glass mural inside the spiral stairwell. There are no curtains, but there are no neighbors, either. The floors are stone: slate from China or nearby Mount Adams.
Laying the concrete-block walls, he worked with an old mason who did near-perfect work. "He was slow," Bob remembers, "but he knew the business. When we got to the top floor, our roof was only off by three-eighths of an inch. This place was absolutely square.
Unlike Jerry Bjorklund, height wasn't an issue with local planners in Klickitat County. "They really didn't bother me about height," Bob says. "Now they would. Now they're pretty particular. And because I have so many code violations inside the house-like the stairwell, where I don't meet specifications-for my final inspection, they came out here and said, 'Bob, we'd just as soon you never got a final inspection. That's where we left that."
Even without the final official sign-off, he's confident he's inside the law. "My original permit goes back so far," Bob says. "Since then the rules have changed, so I'm grandfathered under an older disposition as far as the county inspections are concerned."
But going up to sixty-five feet did complicate some details. "The wiring," he says, "is all inside conduit. It had to be. By the time I got to the place I was going to put my electricity in, the inspector said it was a commercial building because it was over three floors, so everything has to be in conduit. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't use it, but now I'm glad I did." Like the DeClements castle, tall evergreen trees stand so near the castle walls the gutters have to be cleaned of their needles. It's a terrifying job, so high up, but with forest fires a threat, it has to be done. Still, with the river so close and a constant, heavy flow of water from the natural artesian well, Bob's not too worried.
"The fire danger is modest to light because of the situation along the river," he says. "Nobody camps here because the government owns most of the surrounding land. But fire is one of the reasons why I went with concrete and steel."
All day long, in good weather, people raft and kayak past the west side of the castle. The river's rushing babble is the background sound to every minute here.
"See that rock over there?" Bob says, pointing at the steep cliffs on the opposite side of the White Salmon River. "It's the same kind of rock over here. So when I put my foundation in, I was right on bedrock. When the guy came to inspect my foundation, he said, 'What the hell are you expecting? Are you going to make a bomb shelter? I said, 'If the river ever comes up, it's not going to take my house out.»
And Bob Nippolt's glad he did. "In 1995, they had a hundred-year flood," he says. "The river crested four or five feet from right here. There were logs and chairs and everything in the world coming downstream."
With its bomb-shelter basement and huge beams, Bob admits most of his house is overbuilt. Getting it done took seven or eight years of less-than-continuous work. "I'd shut down in the wintertime," Bob says, "or I'd run out of money."
Unlike Jerry, Bob found bankers were willing to lend him money for his dream.
"I don't think financing was a problem," he says. "I have a loan through Countrywide-they were very happy to finance me. Earlier on, I had a local bank finance me. At that time, the house was fairly well known. As far as fire and things, it's pretty impervious to most disasters."
Those «disasters» include the parties. "I feel my house is just about impervious to people, too," Bob says. "I've been here with three hundred people all dancing in the living room."
Then there are always the uninvited guests. Pointing out water stain on the white inside walls, Bob says, "A rodent got in the bottom of the downspout, and the pipe filled up and broke off and the water was directed into my unfinished top floor So I did get water throughout the house."
Instead of concrete block, the inside walls are finished with rough plaster painted white. "To make it look like wattle," Bob says, "first we put plaster on with the straw mixed in, but that wasn't working. Then we found out that if we cut the straw into about six-to-eight-inch lengths, then put the plaster on, then patted the straw into the wet plaster, then we got fairly close to what we wanted."
Pointing out the three chimneys-two for fireplaces, and one for the basement oil-fired boiler-he says, "Last winter I came home from Hood River and there was a large animal behind the TV, moving. That's the day a duck had flown down the flue. He came down to the fireplace and into the house. I had a hell of a time getting him out."
And like Jerry and Roger, he gets the curious people. Bob says, "A few times in the summertime people show up. It's mostly because I have so many friends in the area. They all say, 'Oh well, Bob doesn't care. Let's go see Bob.»
He adds, "And it works-long as they bring whiskey."
In an odd coincidence, MTV contacted both Bob Nippolt and Roger DeClements about renting their castles to film an episode of the television show Reel World. Roger told them no. Bob liked the idea, but it was too late in the season for the network to get motel rooms in the area for its fifty-person production team.
At this time, the top floor is unfinished. Wide arched windows look out over the stone terraces far below. "I'm not afraid of heights," Bob says. "I've parachuted and hang-glided. Heights don't bother me. The only thing that bothers me now is I don't have any knees left. I'm not as agile as I was."
This year, he's planting his twenty-six acres with hay and trees in order to qualify for lower property taxes. He's building a massive new front entry that supports a stone patio off the second-floor bedrooms.
What he'd like to do is build a second wing, a glassed-in dining room off the kitchen. And he'd like to replace the windows he made by hand in the basement, taking apart and re-using the parts of Andersen windows he got cheap. For the outside windowsills, he wishes he'd used concrete sill block instead of construction-grade foam.
"Because I was just making the place for myself. I probably should've designed for a lot more closet space," 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 DeC
lements'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, your quads, your lats and traps. You forget about that lazy old penis. Who needs it. In a way it's a peace, an escape from sex. A vacation from libido. You might see a hot woman and think, "Grrrrrrr," but your next egg white omelette or set of squats is a lot more attractive.
I didn't go into this stupid. This is a kind of weird aside, but a friend in medical school made me a deal that if I introduced her to Brad Pitt, she'd sneak me in to help her dissect some cadavers. She met Brad, and I spent a long night helping her disassemble dead bodies so first-year premed students could study them. Our third cadaver was a sixty-year-old physician. He had the muscle mass and definition of a man in his twenties, but when we opened his chest, his heart was almost the size of his head. I held his chest open and my friend poured in Formalin until his lungs floated. My friend looked at his freaking big heart, and his equally freaky-big dick, and told me: testosterone. Self-administered for years.
She showed me the coiled little wires and the pacemaker buried in his chest and told me he had a history of heart attack after heart attack.
About this same time, a national bodybuilding magazine ran an occasional little feature in its back pages. It wasn't in every issue, and it wasn't in very many, but each feature was a catch-up profile about a star bodybuilder from the 1980s. These were the guys that Ed and Bill wanted to become. Back then, these stars posed and gave interviews swearing they were blessed with great genetics and determination, they just worked hard and ate well, they never used steroids. They swore.
In the update features, these same guys were pale and doughy, battling health problems from diabetes to cancer. And they admitted they had been using steroids, and monkeying with their insulin levels, and shooting human growth hormone.
I
knew all this, and I still jumped off the cliff.
My friends didn't stop me. They only told me to eat enough protein to make the investment worthwhile. Still, I didn't buy the ten-pound blocks of egg white. I never filled my fridge with rows and rows of foil-wrapped boneless, skinless chicken breasts and baked potatoes the way Ed and Bill used to. The way they used to stock up for each steroid cycle like it was a six-week siege. I wasn't that dedicated.
I just took the little white pills and worked out and one day in the shower, I noticed my nuts were disappearing.
Okay, I'm sorry. I promised a lot of friends I wouldn't go here, but this was the turning point. When the old goose eggs shrink to Ping-Pong balls, then to marbles, then your doctor asks if you want a refill on your Anadrol script, it's easy to say no.
Here you are, looking great, bright and alert, pumped and ripped, you're looking more like a man than you ever have, but you're less of a man where it counts. You're becoming the simulacrum of masculinity.
Besides, going into this, the appeal of being a freaky, massive pile of muscle had already started to wane. Sure, at first it would be fun, like owning a rambling Victorian mansion covered in gingerbread trim; but after the first couple weeks the constant maintenance would eat up my life. I could never wander very far from a gym. I'd be eating egg protein every hour. All this, and the whole project would still collapse some day.
My father was dead, Ed and Bill were a mess, and I was fast losing faith in tangible shit. Tangible, temporal shit. Here I'd written a story, a make-believe book, and it was making me more money than any real work I'd ever done. I had about a thirty-day window of free time between my book obligations and the opening of the Fight Club movie. Here was a thirty-day experiment, an updated Jack London adventure packaged in a little brown bottle.
I jumped off the cliff because it was an adventure.
And for thirty days I felt complete. But just until the tiny white pills ran out. Temporarily permanent. Complete and independent of everything. Everything except the Anadrol.
Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories) Page 9