"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 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.

"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.