No one knows how long the bull market will last, least of all me, but all good things come to an end. Ask the dinosaurs. One geological moment they're standing in some fern glade in the redwoods, bellowing brainlessly, masters of the earth. We were there: the mammals, or proto-mammals, small rat- and weasel-like creatures with sharp teeth and shining eyes. And when the dinosaurs died—when their life cycle went bust—we moved out of the shadows and took over the earth. We are the most fearsome predator the earth has ever spawned, and those creatures that know us, fear us.

Walking through the ruins of Castle, I had a sense of man as the dinosaur of this particular geological moment. There were shining eyes, watching from the shadows of ramshackle buildings. The others were there. I could hear them scurrying about when I looked through empty windows at rooms in which soiled doves once plied their trade.

There are other eyes in the woodlands, under the aspens, and these eyes are watching the big trophy homes that have begun to dominate the western landscape. There will be a bust to the boom, sooner or later, because that has always been the way. The big homes, too expensive for local folks, will fall into disrepair. The paint will peel from the walls, and the bare boards will bleach out, like bones under a desert sun. And then the watchers in the wood will move into the tumbledown buildings. The castles built by the wealth effect will lie broken and still under a merciless blue sky. And in the shadows under the shattered windows, the new inhabitants will scurry this way and that, their eyes shining, masters of all they survey.