Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)

Confessions in Stone

When you're flying from Seattle to Portland, Oregon, as you turn to make your final approach into the airport from the east, there, outside the airplane windows, right below you… there it is:

A vision of white battlements and towers. Narrow white turrets and a drawbridge that spans a murky lake, its water pooling around a crumbling stone ruin. At one end, stands a massive round keep.

There, in the hills above the blue-collar town of Camas, Washington, where most days the air smells like the sour steam from the paper mill, there it is:

A castle.

A big castle. A real castle.

It's surrounded by little hobby farms and tract housing developments and the huge postmodern complex of the new Camas High School, but this is a Viking castle. Complete with racks filled with battle-axes, ready for the next fight. A fire-breathing dragon. Gates sixteen feet tall. All that and a Bunn coffeemaker. A Frigidaire refrigerator and Jerry Bjorklund, the builder and resident Viking.

Fly four hundred miles northeast, into the Selkirk Mountains on the Idaho panhandle, and you'll find a Bavarian-style castle perched in the snow fields at 4,600 feet. A fortress of stone and stained glass with a heated indoor swimming pool, double-fisted chunks of semiprecious yellow citrine, purple amethyst and pink-rose quartz embedded in the walls. Arches and pinnacles and spires, all of it hand-built, rock by rock, by a single man named Roger DeClements.

And somewhere between the Viking and the Bavarian is a tall narrow tower of four floors rising from a rocky point at the edge of the White Salmon River. In this third castle, a nude mannequin sits on the rail of a third-floor balcony, ready to distract the white-water rafters and kayakers who drift past and only glimpse her bare breasts for a minute before the river pulls them around the next bend and leaves them wondering what they saw. Or thought they saw: a cluster of gray stone towers. Heavy timber balconies. A waterfall trickling, green, down the front of a stone terrace. Massive canopy beds and antique armoires and an ex-jet fighter pilot named Bob Nippolt.

There, deep in the woods of the Cascade Mountains, it's a vision… a fantasy.

A castle.

"There seems to be this underground of castle people," says Roger DeClements, who changed his name from the very German family name Grimes. He says, "There must be between twenty and thirty people building castles in the United States right now. A lot of them are people doing do-it-yourself work, so they're going kind of slow. They're starting out like I did with their designs. But there's also a couple very rich folks who just-boom-go and build the biggest castle they can imagine."

Here a man's home is his castle. And vice versa. And maybe this trend is no more than a bigger version of the basic nesting instinct. What SUVs are to regular cars, these castles are to regular houses. Solid. Safe. Secure.

Or maybe castle building is a rite of passage. A form of meditation or reflection. During the second half of his life, after his mother died, the psychologist and philosopher Carl Jung set to work building a stone castle. He built it in Bollingen, on the shore of Lake Zurich in Switzerland. He called it his "confession in stone."

Or maybe castle building is a reaction to the fast-paced, short-lived spirit of our times. For architects, the modern era ended at 3:32 P.M. on July 15, 1972, when the Pruitt-Igoe housing development was dynamited in St. Louis, Missouri. It had been a prize-winning example of clean-line, boxy, International-style architecture. What architects called "a machine for living." By 1972, it was a failure. The residents hated the place, and the city declared it uninhabitable.

That same year, the architect Robert Venturi declared that most people's idea of utopia was closer to Disneyland or Las Vegas than to a modern glass-box apartment.

So whether building a castle is a statement or a mission, a nesting instinct or a penis extension… what follow are the stories of three men who each left a career-a policeman, a building contractor, and a jet pilot-and set out to build a castle. Here are the mistakes they made. And what they've learned along the way.

Walking through his castle, high on its granite mountain above Sandpoint, Idaho, Roger DeClements is forty-seven years old but looks twenty-seven, with long thick hair that hangs past his shoulders. He's got wiry arms and legs and wears a white, long-sleeved T-shirt and blue jeans. Tennis shoes. His fingernails are a surprise, long and ridged, maybe from the years when he played bass with a rock band.

"I've always been building," Roger says. "I built my first house in 1975. Then we rented a place and it was right next to the railroad tracks and people would always come knocking on the door. Then we saw the movie The Beastmaster, and that gave me some ideas. I thought a castle would be good because it would be secure. Then I also noticed houses were depreciating with time where a castle would appreciate with time and not rot away."

By now Roger's built three castles-from his first, which took five weeks, to his latest, which is for sale at a million-dollar price. "Basically, I thought it would be fun," he says. "Fun to live in. Fun for people to look at. And then the fact that it would be there permanently, and you could pass it on for generations."

For Jerry Bjorklund, it was fun plus a little alcohol.

"I'm a pretty good sipper," he says. "I'm drinking some Black Velvet one night, and I called a friend on the city council, and I said, 'I'm going to build a castle. And he said, 'No, you can't do that. And I said, 'Yeah, I am. And the next morning I wake up and thought, 'Goddamn it. I told him I was going to build a castle, so here I go…"

But why a castle?

Jerry shrugs and says, "I don't know. Nordic heritage or whatever. I always had an interest in them. And it seemed like a good idea. Nobody else had one."

With a dark tan from winters spent fishing in Mazatlán, Jerry sits in an apartment that occupies one wing of his castle in the green hills above Camas, Washington. He's fifty-nine years old, a retired officer of the Camas Police Department. His face is square with a heavy cleft chin and a Viking's bushy mustache gone gray. His heavy eyebrows and full head of hair are gray. He wears a black pocket T-shirt and jeans. On his forearms, old tattoos have turned dark blue.

Jerry smokes Delicados cigarettes from Mexico. "I bring them back," he says. "I get them for seven dollars a carton." And he laughs a rumbling smoker's laugh.

His light-blue eyes almost match the pale-blue countertops of the apartment's kitchen. He drinks black coffee and wears a watch with a heavy silver wristband.

His ancestors were Norwegian, and he was born in North Dakota but raised here in Washington State. He retired in 1980 and built a small A-frame house. In 1983, he started his dream castle.

"I was going to build it out of rock," Jerry says. "We had a lot of rock here. And I struggled with that for probably six months. Rocks. Mortar. Washing rocks. Jesus."

Digging rock out of a pit on his five and one-half acres, Jerry built a twenty-two-foot tower. He says, "I got part of a tower built, and I could see that this was going to be a real labor-intensive adventure."

He laughs and says, "And I thought, 'There has got to be a better way.»

So he called his uncle, a master plasterer for fifty years, and asked about stucco. By July of 1983, he was building his castle out of wood and covering it with stucco.

He says, "It's a lot of two-by-sixes and a lot of half-inch plywood and a lot of staples."

The framing is two-by-sixes every two feet, covered with sheets of half-inch plywood. Stapled to the plywood is fifteen-pound tar paper, then stucco wire, which looks like chicken wire but is offset to allow the plaster to get behind the wire and harden around it. "They put the scratch coat on-that's the first coat," Jerry says. "Then you put the brown coat on. You smooth that out. Then I came back with an acoustic sprayer, like you'd use to spray acoustic ceilings, and we used white sand and Zonolite insulation. We'd mix this up in the acoustic machine and apply that with air pressure."

He says, "Just on the exterior alone, there's 380,000 pounds of sand and cement that I personally troweled on by hand. Then, I have a severe fear of heights, and it was a hell of a task when my last scaffold was up at thirty-two feet. Ah, Jesus, that was a terrible job, and it took me three days to do the parapet."

The castle consists of a three-story «keep» at the east end. Extending west from the keep, two wings enclose a central courtyard. The west end of the courtyard is enclosed by a garage. The keep is about 1,500 square feet, with 500 on each floor. Each of the wings is about 1,000 square feet with one wing finished as an apartment and the other as storage space. The garage is about 500 square feet.

Thinking about the construction, Jerry lights another cigarette. He laughs and says, "There are some fantastic stories."

To finish the forty-foot walls of the keep, Jerry built a tripod on the roof, using the tongues made to tow mobile homes-basically, ten-inch steel I beams with a length of well casing as a boom. He says, "This is really scary. I built a four-by-eight-foot basket. It was tall enough you could stand in it, and it was closed in with wire on three sides so you could actually work on the surface of the building. And I got this one-ton twelve-volt electric winch with five-sixteenths cable, and I got that mounted on the top of the cage with a remote control. Picture this: two guys get into this with a roll of wire or paper or whatever they're going to apply. We'd get in there and pull ourselves up to where we wanted to work. Well, I cut the well casing too short when I built it, so the basket wouldn't go outside enough to work on the parapet."

There, where the top of the tower flares out, just before the crenellated top, Jerry would have to trowel stucco while leaning backward over nothing but forty feet of air.

"You could work about halfway up the pitch-out, but it was a real son of a bitch after that point." He says, "We're up there dangling on this five-sixteenths-inch cable, and I had two people on the ground with ropes trying to steady this basket. The next day I went to town and bought a bunch of lumber, and we made scaffolding."

It took him four days just to assemble the scaffolding.

Getting the money together was even more tough.

"The goddamn bankers," Jerry says, "I talked to them one time while the castle was under construction, and they said there was no guarantee I was ever going to get it done-so I just said, 'To hell with it…»

He adds, "You won't get a loan from a bank. I've had appraisers come out three different times. What they ultimately conclude is that it is a 'nonconforming structure. " And he laughs. "That just fits it to a tee. Nonconforming… I love it.

"So I'd scratch up a few bucks, and do a little bit," he says. "Then I'd run out of money so I'd have to go back and do something else to make a few bucks. Then I'd come back and hit it again. You learn how to wire and plumb. You just learn as you go. I wouldn't say I'd never do it again. But thank God I'm getting too old."

The floors inside the keep are supported by eight-by-eight vertical posts that hold eight-by-twelve beams, rough cut by a friend from the hearts of trees.

"The first two floors weren't too bad," Jerry says. "The third floor was a real son of a bitch. The height. Evergreen Truss brought their truss truck out, and he had to put the extension on his boom, and he could still just barely get up there and set those beams for me. It was goddamn scary."

The first-floor kitchen includes a 1923 wood-burning kitchen stove and a half bath. The living room is on the second floor. The bedroom and a full bathroom are on the top floor. "When you go to the toilet here," Jerry says, "you're thirty feet off the deck."

Divorced now, at the time he built the keep Jerry Bjorklund was married. "You get women involved and it's 'I've got to have this. And I've got to have that. I've got to have a dining room set over here, and I've got to have a dishwasher. " Jerry says, "You start accommodating all that and it takes away from what I originally had in mind to do."

Once you're inside, the keep feels like a house, complete with wall-to-wall carpeting and crystal chandeliers. "It's like living any other place," he says. "You just forget about it."

When he started building, Jerry still didn't have anybody's official permission.

"At this point I was one-hundred-percent antigovernment," he says. "Of course I had no permits, no nothing, and my brother said, 'You'd better get some permission to do what you're doing. So I built a scale model and took it down to the building department and said, 'This is what I want to build. The old guy looked at it and said, 'How tall is it? And I said it's going to be forty feet. And he said, 'No, you can't do forty feet. You can only go thirty-six, by code."

The reason was, traditionally, the longest ladder a fire engine carries is forty feet. So Jerry filed for a variance, showing how his top floor would only be thirty-six feet high.

"They finally concluded that domes and spires and parapets were not included in the ordinance," he says, "therefore I could build it forty feet. That solved that problem."

Jerry got the scratch coat of plaster on the walls, then took off for a fishing trip to Canada. "We built it, then we built the plans." He paid a friend five hundred bucks and eventually got a permit that officially allowed the castle as a remodel of an existing agricultural building-an old barn long gone from the property.

Lighting another cigarette and laughing, Jerry says, "Basically I snookered them."

Since then, Jerry's castle has become a landmark.

"Airline pilots I talk to, for Alaska Airlines," Jerry says, "they make a turn when they come in from Seattle. They follow a route that takes them right over the top of the castle. They're announcing it to the passengers and all this shit. I talked to a couple of the pilots, and they said, 'We call that the Castle Turn into PDX.»

The castle's finest hour was in 1993, when a friend's wife sewed huge banners for the place. Four banners hung from the castle keep, and a half-dozen banners hung from the courtyard battlements and parapet towers. The keep's 250-pound door was painted with the castle's crest, a lion, similar to the crest of Norway. All of this, for a very special event.

"My daughter got married here ten years ago. We had a big wedding out here. There was, like, three hundred people." Jerry says, "I had this place dolled up like you wouldn't believe. Big banners and horseshit. Her husband dressed as Robin Hood, and she dressed as Maid Marion. And we had the Society for Creative Anachronism people out here for three days. I set up portable showers, and I had ten porta-potties. Jesus. Dance floors. The whole deal."

Since then the medieval groupies have talked about buying the castle as a permanent headquarters for Renaissance fair events. Another couple tried to buy the castle in order to lease it out for weddings; they'd planned to rent period costumes and provide catering, but Jerry backed away from the deal when it all seemed to be going too fast.

One irony is how a fortress built to exclude strangers now seems to attract a steady stream of the curious.

Jerry lights another Delicato cigarette and says, "We used to have a lot of trouble with people driving in all the time. Christ, one morning I was sitting in the castle having a cup of coffee, and I hear this noise, and the wife comes into the kitchen and says, 'What the hell is going on? She looked out the little window on the bottom floor, and there's a guy with a forty-foot motor home trying to turn around in the driveway. It took him about half an hour."

He says, "We put up NO TRESPASSING signs, but there must be a lot of illiterate people out there because they don't seem to know what it means."

An independent film company has used the castle as a backdrop for a film about the Middle Ages. Jerry's mother and brother live in the two closest houses. State Farm Insurance has asked about coming out to see just what it is they've insured, but no agent has ever made the trip.

"Rumor has it there's a basement dungeon under the tower," Jerry says, "and I just let people keep thinking that."

He adds, "I'm probably known as a crazy man in Camas, but I don't give a damn what they think."

His castle rises next to a small lake edged with cattails and lawn. This is the flooded quarry where Jerry dug rock for his original construction. That first labor-intensive tower was so solid it took two days to knock it down with a bulldozer. Now the stony ruins of it rise from the depths of the flooded quarry. Near the ruins, the castle's drawbridge spans the lake. The drawbridge used to lift and lower, until Jerry's brother, Ken, came along.

"There's an apparatus up in there with a motor and a series of couplers, and I had cables down," Jerry says. "And I had a guy rig me up a switch. My brother's the one who broke it. He came down here with a couple of his cronies-I was gone-and they were all drunk and messing with the goddamn bridge. They messed the switch up. They were always down here running it. Everybody who came here had to work the goddamn drawbridge."

With Jerry spending every winter fishing in Mexico, the castle is a little worse for wear. Inside the keep, sections of Sheetrock and insulation are pulled down to show dark stains and water damage inside the walls. You can smell mildew in stale air.

"I used a system of downspouts inside the walls, which was fine-made out of ABS," he says. "When I did the gutters on top of the building, I used a trough-type system. Then I had to get a downspout through this galvanized metal into my ABS. We had some made, and they worked fine. We used a fiberglass buildup roof and it held up really good, but then we started getting water leaks. This was maybe four years ago. Lo and behold, the galvanized drop out of the gutter had rusted away."

The stucco isn't as white as it used to be. In some places it's cracked and chipping away. In a few spots, the metal lath underneath shows through.

"The worst part is the exterior stucco," Jerry says. "I've coated it twice: the first time, and then I redid it about twelve years ago. I should go around and clean it up. I use water and bleach and spray it. Then it's a matter of batching. You get a mixer and a sprayer and all your material, and you keep mixing and spraying, and it goes pretty fast.

"This place is in pretty rough shape, compared to how it was," he adds. "But it's fixable."

So this is the year for fixing the castle. Among other projects. In the garage is a stripped-down thirty-year-old, twenty-one-foot StarCraft fishing boat. Jerry is installing a metal dragon that will rear up from the bow with a red eye on one side and a green eye on the other. The dragon is plumbed to spit fire. He's adding twelve inches to raise the bow and help the flat-bow boat handle better in rough water.

"I'll have it down in Mexico, and we get into some stuff in the afternoons," he says. "The wind picks up, and you're riding in ten-, twelve-foot waves. It causes you some concern with an open bow."

In retrospect, he says, "My advice would be: Don't do it. It's obvious, looking at the exterior, that stucco is not conducive to this area. They've come out with new exterior stucco material I'm going to use, and it's a hell of a lot better. But I've lived here with women, and they don't like this, and they don't like that, and they don't like going up and down the stairs. That's probably why there's no women here now." And again, he laughs.

Jerry Bjorklund laughs a lot. Far overhead, you can hear the dull roar of a jetliner making the "castle turn" into Portland International Airport.

And it all goes back to that one night, drinking Black Velvet…

"The problem is I told somebody I was going to do it," Jerry says. "That was probably my biggest downfall. If I say I'm going to do something, I don't give a damn what it takes."

But that's not to say Jerry Bjorklund has regrets.

"Too many people, to my mind, they do things like everybody else does, and I'm not going to be like that. Never have been." And, again, he lights another Mexican cigarette and laughs his gravelly laugh.

For Roger DeClements-who has built three castles-the first was more about speed and saving money. Born in Edmonds, Washington, Roger worked as a building contractor during the 1970s. Roger has a wife and three children, and because his wife is afraid of doctors, all the kids were born in his castles. The first two kids, in a castle he built in Machias, Washington, five miles north of Snohomish, which is east of Everett, which is north of Seattle. It's a little town named after a town in Maine, with a little white steepled church built in 1902, and it sits in a valley on the Pilchuk River.

"My first castle," Roger says, "I got financing. It was 1980, when interest rates were eighteen percent, and we went to the local banks and nobody was giving loans then. Somebody mentioned Citicorp, so we went to Citicorp, and they said, 'Sure… at eighteen percent…»

Still, Citicorp didn't know what their money was financing.

"They didn't even know it was going to be a castle," Roger says. "They just wanted security, so we used another piece of property as collateral. The second castle, we used our own money. This third castle, we used our own money, then when we got farther along we just had a banker come up and look and see it to refinance it.

"The first castle was actually a concrete tilt-up castle. We carved the shape of the walls in the sand, put the rebar in there, poured the concrete in, tilted them up and picked the shape out of the sand. It was a very inexpensive castle and completed in five weeks. I did everything from start to finish."

Basing them on Disneyland castles and castles in movies, Roger drew his own plans.

"In Washington State," he says, "you have to take your plans to a structural engineer and they'll put their stamp on. And then, no problem after that.

"My degree is in chemistry and physics, but I've been doing a lot of architecture and engineering, myself," Roger explains. "And I specialize in castles.

"The first one was a single tower," he says. "Eight hundred square feet on two floors. It was built basically like a basement, with concrete walls we tilted up. Then we insulated by furring out with two-by-fours and doing Sheetrock on the inside. A lot of people across the country, that's how they'll start out building their castles, but I found that doesn't work very well. Plus, everybody was coming out and asking, 'Is that real stone? So I got so tired of that question."

He adds, "We built it in one day, so it was quite the surprise for the neighborhood. Boom-and there it was.

"Kids would love to sneak down the driveway to see how far they could get before getting too scared. People would love to stop on the road and take pictures."

That first castle cost only $14,000 and took only five weeks from start to finish. It still sits on five acres near the bank of the Pilchuk River. It has electric heat, but what Roger gained in speed and cost, the DeClements family paid for in comfort.

"Furring the walls out with insulation," Roger says, "that doesn't work well. The cold goes right through the concrete. It gets right to where the insulation is. Then the warm inside air filters through the insulation and contacts the cold surface of the concrete or blocks. Then the water will condense. As soon as one water molecule condenses, another one is there to take its place. So you get this continuous condensation on the cold wall behind the insulation. That's a problem, because it will cause mold to grow, and it smells like a basement."

In order to go back to college and study for a graduate degree, Roger sold that castle to artists to use as a studio. "Before I built my second castle, I went back to college and learned a lot," he says. "I was a contractor from 75 until about 87, building homes and commercial buildings, using the traditional methods. Going to college, I learned a lot more about the physical process of what's going on with heat transfer and moisture."

He says, "So for the second castle we built, we went to real stone."

That second castle stands on a rock above a waterfall in Sedro-Woolley, Washington. It's perched on a stone precipice, high above a nature pool where local kids swim all summer. Instead of electric heat, the second castle was heated with a wood stove.

He says, "The second one we designed to look like a castle, and you couldn't tell when it was built. We used all stone and incorporated a new construction method, too, starting with a double-wall castle where you go from rock on the outside, then a layer of rigid, extruded polystyrene, then reinforced concrete, and then you'd go back to stone again, so you couldn't see the concrete or insulation on the inside. All you could see is the stone."

Step-by-step, Roger explains: "The first thing to go up is the rebar grid, then the insulation boards. Then we run the conduit and plumbing, high-speed Internet, whatever you want. Then you build a double rock wall, on the inside and the outside. After you get up about eight feet, you fill it with concrete. Then you do it over again. The two rock walls, which are held together by stainless-steel rods, form a permanent concrete form. It's just like the Romans did a long time ago. They did the same thing. They didn't use metal ties, they used extra-long rocks to tie the two rock walls together.

"We try to find a quarry, where the stones come out rectangular-shaped, ashlar stones, so we're not trying to stack a whole bunch of round stones. It can be done with river rock, but it will take a lot more time, and it won't be quite as strong."

Instead of five acres, the second castle sits on twenty. Instead of five weeks, this castle took Roger from 1992 to 1995 to build.

"The second castle couldn't be seen from the road like the first one could," he says. "It was a little more remote. I got a good deal on the land because the only way to get there was you had to cross this hundred-foot-deep gorge. So I built a metal bridge, then all the materials were hauled over in a wheelbarrow. Sometimes I go back there and I can't believe what I'd done."

Still, Roger DeClements says he loves the work. "A lot of people will come up and say, 'Oh, I can't believe this. I could never do this. To me, it's basically clear and simple. It's very relaxing to do it. It's very peaceful and relaxing to be out there in the fresh air with the trees and the hills… stacking stones."

It's interesting to note here, Carl Jung began to explore his subconscious by playing a building game with stones. Like a puzzle. Putting them together, he felt he was plunged into outer space, where he had visions that would shape the rest of his life.

"It's like doing a jigsaw puzzle," Roger DeClements says. "Getting all the pieces together. But it doesn't strain you or keep your mind going a mile a minute. And then you can get creative, because you can make curves and towers and different shapes with it."

And living in a castle?

"It feels different to live in a castle instead of a house," he says. "It's quiet. It doesn't shake in the wind. The temperature doesn't go up and down with the outside temperature. The stone holds it constant." He adds, "I haven't been able to make the transition to a medieval knight or something. I'm still the same person."

That castle was forty-five feet tall, with arched windows and four thousand square feet of living space on three floors. Still, when it came time to sell and move on, the first two realtors balked. They said there were no comparable sales in the area. Subsequent realtors said not to worry, and they immediately had three full-price offers and sold that castle in 1995 for $425,000.

The search was on for new "castle land." They looked in Utah, but land was too expensive or no water was available. "We went from Logan, we went up to Jackson, to Targee, Sun Valley, and up into Montana to Big Sky, then to over here, and this just beat them all by a mile."

Now, here they are in Bonner County, Idaho, high in the Schweitzer Mountain ski resort.

"You can do plans ahead of time or you can just build," Roger says. "It depends on where you build. Different locations, different cities, different counties have different permit requirements. Some of them can take a couple years to give a permit. Some of them can take ten minutes. That's one reason we like Idaho. They're permit-friendly."

He says, "If you're searching for castle land, I tell a lot of people to go to the county planning department first and ask them. A lot of people will think: 'I want an eighty-foot-tall tower… So they need to check if the county has a thirty-five-foot height restriction, or any architectural requirements."

The Idaho castle, Roger named Castle Kataryna for his daughter, who was born here. It has a winding staircase inside, walnut woodwork, and pointed Gothic doors and windows, many of them stained-glass.

Touring the castle, Roger points out the walnut window frames he made. "In the second castle," he says, "the windows were put in after the walls were built. In this third castle, the windows actually went in right after the rebar and insulation, before the rock goes up around them. That gave us a lot more authentic look and finish. In the second castle, we had to try to cut the boards to fit, then caulk around them. In the third castle, the windows went in first, wrapped in plastic to protect them, stone was built around them, we attached the window frames only to the outside rock layer, which can move and expand. The inside stone layer stays seventy-two degrees, and the outside can go from zero to a hundred, so it gets bigger and smaller. This way the windows will move with the outside. We attach them to the outside because that's where we want to seal them from the weather."

Another improvement with this latest castle is the «hydronic» heating system, where a boiler heats water that runs through piping under the floors. It's even, quiet heat, and the castle's thermal mass of stone will stay warm for three days after the heat is turned off.

In a little room near the castle gates, Roger shows the boiler, saying, "I like it because I couldn't have baseboards or forced-air registers in the look of a castle. This hides it, so it's invisible, plus you don't have the noise of the fans coming on."

Between the insulated stone walls and the hydronic heat, Roger DeClements has evolved his perfect formula for a livable castle. Well, almost perfect…

"In the first castle," he says, "I didn't anticipate the problem with the mold. Which is actually a big thing now. A few years ago it was radon, now it's mold in homes. They make homes so tight that they've locked all this moisture in there, and as soon as moisture gets to a cold surface it condenses. With our new method, with the insulation layer inside the wall, the moisture never has the chance to get near it. So my wife complains this castle is too dry. We have twenty feet of snow piled outside, and she says, 'This is too dry.»

To solve the dry air, he's built a heated swimming pool in the stairwell. There, a waterfall will cascade from the top of a stone newel post. Candles will sit on stone ledges, and the pump and filters will be tucked away in an underwater grotto cave.

Like Jerry Bjorklund, Roger found his wife had some castle ideas of her own. Breaking ground in June of 1999, he'd planned to build the third castle by using a construction boom-much like the tripod of trailer tongues Jerry built-but his wife wouldn't let him cut the trees he'd have to remove to let the boom swing around. So, as with the second castle, Roger carried each stone up by hand.

Now, thanks to his wife, the castle is surrounded by native tamarack trees, cedars and pines and rocky fields of huckleberry bushes. Deer and elk and bear roam the neighborhood. The view goes all the way to the Rocky Mountains and Montana. It's a view Roger's had plenty of time to enjoy.

"I got all the stone up there one stone at a time," he says. "The second castle was built all by hand, carrying the stone over that bridge by wheelbarrow. As we built those double rock walls, we put logs sticking out through the walls on both sides. Then we'd put planks across those. We'd put logs through the walls, then pull them out as we worked our way up. That's actually how they did the old castles. They had a name for them-they called them 'put logs. If you look at old photos of the castles in Europe you see all these holes in the walls. Of course, some were to shoot arrows out of, but the little holes were where they put these logs so then you don't have scaffolding going all the way up the walls. I had no idea that's how they did it."

After removing the scaffolding "put logs," Roger filled most of the small holes with square stones. Some he left open as vents.

In order to keep building all winter, he enclosed his construction platform in a plywood shed to protect himself from the high mountain wind and snow and the fact he was working on a sheer wall that rose five stories above a steep hillside.

"When it was five degrees outside," Roger says, "I kept laying stone all winter."

He and a second man lifted the long, eight-by-eight rough-cut Douglas fir beams-one end at a time-into the beam slots. He studded the inside walls with chunks of semiprecious stone. Amethyst. Citrine. Rose quartz. Green calcite. Clear quartz crystals. He hand-carved decorative patterns in the kitchen cabinets and embedded stained-glass mosaics in the masonry walls. On the second floor, he points out a metal statue on the fireplace mantel.

"See the dragon?" Roger says. "A castle has got to have a dragon."

In the bright mountain light, the narrow stained-glass windows blaze bright as red, blue, and yellow neon. In some windows, the colored glass panels are sealed between the layers of clear double-paned windows. Other windows, the stained glass is the only glass in the frame.

"Some windows," Roger says, "I had to go back to the traditional, where I just had to touch the stained glass. The double-paned I try to stay away from as much as I can. When you look at the moon, you can kind of see a double moon. If I can just use solid glass, you can see the moon the way it is."

Battlements are lined with sharp spires of Columbia River basalt. The ceilings are twelve feet high. All the windows are built into pointed Gothic archways in the stone walls.

"You follow the windows with the stones until you get to the point the stones are going to fall down," Roger explains. "Higher than that, the stones are just propped up by sticks. A bigger window, when I get to the top I actually make a small form to do the peak on. A few sticks will hold some rocks, but it's much faster to use a form. You can stack the stones up, and just pull the form out."

He adds, "If you bump one of the sticks, then… the rocks will start coming down."

From the windows to the stonework to the built-in vacuum cleaner system to the wood shingles on the conical tower roofs, Roger DeClements did it all. He wrote his name and the date on the trusses inside the roof. And he followed the ancient mason's tradition of sealing his chisel and trowel inside the walls when he was done laying stone. But by accident. The tools actually fell between the two layers of stone and he buried them with the concrete he poured to fill the space in the permanent form.

Still, despite all this work, Castle Kataryna isn't quite done. There's still the drawbridge to build. Another twenty pallets-thirty-two tons-of stone will soon be delivered by a Canadian quarry. With enough money, Roger plans to build a "great hall" farther uphill, behind the current castle, then connect the two buildings with battlement walls that will enclose a courtyard similar to Jerry Bjorklund's castle plan.

Beyond that, Roger DeClements is already looking for new land for a fourth castle. He wants to learn ironworking, and build a medieval village around his next project.

"The first three were mostly just castle keeps," he says, "where the king and queen would live. I haven't been able to build the big courtyard walls and the big entrance towers and gates to make a castle twenty thousand square feet. The next time, I want to have a big great hall with timbers like a cathedral. And courtyard walls going around. I've got the plans in my head and a little bit down on paper."

He adds, "We looked on the Oregon coast and it was out of our budget."

And Roger DeClements isn't the only person looking to build his dream castle. Since posting a website for Castle Kataryna on the Internet, he's become the nation's guru for private castle projects. People from every state have contacted him for advice about how to build their own fantasy projects.

"With the Web," he says, "I'm getting all these people contacting me. I never realized there were so many people with the passion for castles. They love them. Lots of people say, 'It's been my dream for years to build a castle. And it's not just men, it's the women, too, who have this same dream."

As the point man for the new American castle movement, he says, "The attraction is a love of the romantic era of castles people envision. The better life they picture back then. There's a whole group called the SCA [Society for Creative Anachronism] that like to create the medieval times as they thought they should've been. Not as they were, but as they picture these times in their minds, their fantasies. Also, the movies and the Disney castles have inspired people to want castles, too."

As a practical building contractor, he says, "Besides, the lifespan of so many houses is getting smaller and smaller with the new materials being invented."

Now people from Alaska to Florida are learning from his mistakes.

"When I originally put this castle on the Internet, on a website, I was flooded with orders to build castles all over the United States. There are very few people who have the patience and the time to stack all that stone. And have the knowledge to do it right.

"There are a lot of people who are building castles for themselves, the way I first did. You build a block or concrete shell and then fur it out and insulate it, but I don't recommend that at all. It's just a basement that ends up smelling damp."

In response, Roger does what he can. "People often call me to ask questions and tell me about their projects," he says, "and I try to coach them, but most of them will go back to the old way because they have to cut cost. It just really hurts them in the long run, because then they find out the hard way."

He adds, "So I end up doing a lot of consulting on castle problems."

Despite the castle's million-dollar price, the DeClements family isn't rich. Roger works as a real estate agent with Windemere Realty, at the nearby ski resort, and during most of this last castle's construction the family of six-his kids are three, six and ten years old, plus his wife and a child from her previous marriage-have lived on just the second floor, sharing about a thousand square feet of living space.

Roger says, "My kids are kind of getting tired of all the other kids poking fun at them, wanting to come up and see their castle. They kind of want to be in a normal house so it doesn't attract so much attention." He adds, "My wife, she gets a little bugged with people always coming up. Because it attracts people. But I love talking to them. What strikes me is how many of them say, 'We've just been to Europe looking at castles… I don't know if that's just coincidence or if I'm just attracting more of that type."

It seems odd, but for three men with such similar passions, living relatively close together, Jerry Bjorklund and Roger DeClements and Bob Nippolt have never met. They've never seen each other's castles. It's only a few hours' drive from castle to castle, but they've never even heard about each other.

Working in a mental hospital, Carl Jung noticed that all insane people drew their delusions from a limited stock of images and ideas. These he called «archetypes» and argued these images are inherited and held in common by all people over all time. Through Jung's writing and painting, and later his own castle building-his "confession in stone"-Jung was able to examine and record his subconscious life.

None of these three castle builders has ever heard of Carl Jung.

Near the Columbia Gorge, the border between Washington State and Oregon, about seven miles up from the mouth of the White Salmon River, another castle looms among the mountains. Unlike the DeClements castle, this one rises from a rocky point in a valley floor, at a bend in the rushing, white-water river. It's sixty-five feet tall, four floors rising from a basement dug into the bedrock. A vertical maze of stairs and balconies with a secret room.

Retired from the military and a second career as a commercial jetliner pilot, Bob Nippolt has a full head of thick white hair. He's a slight figure wearing jeans and tennis shoes and black-framed glasses. These days, after years of climbing the castle stairs, he walks a little stiff-legged. His ancestors were Irish, and he practices the bagpipes. Summer nights, he sleeps outdoors on the castle terrace above the river.

In the living room of his castle, a framed black-and-white photo sits on a side table. It shows a building made of rough stone.

"My great grandfather came from around Cork in Ireland," Bob says, holding the photograph, "and he built this house out of stone in North Dakota. He must've come out to North Dakota in the 1870s. It is since in ruins, but the historical society is trying to restore it."

About his own building project, Bob says, "I don't know why I wanted to build a castle. I just saw some pictures of some gatehouses. And I'd seen some gatehouses in Ireland and Scotland, and I thought it would be kind of fun. Then I got carried away. I went crazy."

Beginning in 1988, he built his 4,800-square-foot castle out of rough-faced concrete block. Rising four floors with a basement, the walls are twenty inches thick, consisting of two rows of eight-inch-thick block with a space of about four inches between them. For reinforcement, a grid of three-quarter-inch steel rebar holds each wall, and every third row of blocks is filled solid with concrete. For insulation, the hollow inside the walls is filled with vermiculite. That four-inch hollow also holds the wiring conduit and plumbing.

Like Roger DeClements's castle, the heat comes from water heated in a basement boiler and routed through pipes in the concrete floor.

Steel beams support the first floor. Upper floors rest on closely spaced eight-by-twelve beams.

Bob will tell you, "I bought all the beams at a sale in Salem, Oregon, when a company had gone broke. I went down and looked at them and bought the whole two truckloads. I thought… I'll use them for something. At that time, it occurred to me to build the castle."

He adds, "I should never have found those beams."

First he built a teepee across the small lake from his future castle site. He lived in his wood shake teepee the entire time he was building.

Much of what Bob built with came here-like Bob himself-from a previous life somewhere else. "I read the want ads all the time," he says. "A lot of this stuff here is old planks and old lumber that we ran through the planer right here."

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 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.