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 a
nd 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."
Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories) Page 7