Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)
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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
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.