Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)
Шрифт:
"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.