Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)
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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
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."