peering from behind sweaters and wristwatches in display windows. It's the same excitement we felt as kids when a dog got into our grade school. We're running past Sam Goody, past the Fossil store, the walkie-talkies right behind us, the voices saying, '… the bear and the dog are westbound, headed down the first-level access way to the Underground Eatery…' We're running past Wild Tiger Pizza and Subway Sandwiches. Past teenage girls sitting on the floor, yakking on the pay phones. 'Affirmative,' the walkie-talkie voice says. From behind us, it says, '… I'm about to apprehend both alleged animals…'
All this fuss, this chase. Young men stone us. Young women grope us. Middle-aged men look away, shaking their heads and ignoring the dog that waits in line with them at Tully's for a grande latte. A middle-aged Seattle guy, tall with a blond ponytail and his pants rolled to his knee, exposing bare calves, he walks past, saying, 'You know, there's a leash law in this town.'
An older woman with her beauty parlor hair silver-rinsed and sprayed into a pile, she tugs at one spotted dog arm, tugging the fur and asking, 'What are you promoting?' She trails along, still tugging the fur, asking, 'Who's paying you to do this?' Asking louder, 'Can't you hear me?' Saying, 'Answer me.' Asking, 'Who do you work for?' Saying, 'Tell me…' She's clutching us for half a block, until her grip breaks.
Another middle-aged woman, pushing a stroller the size of a grocery cart, packed with disposable diapers, formula, toys and clothes and shopping bags, with one tiny baby lost somewhere in the mix, in the concrete middle of Pike Place Market, this woman shouts, 'Everyone get back! Get back! For all we know they could be strapped with bombs inside those costumes…'
Everywhere, there's the brain scramble as security guards create public policy to deal with people dressed as animals.
A friend of mine, Monica, used to work as a clown for hire. While she twisted balloons into animals at corporate parties, men were always offering her money to fuck. Looking back, she says that any woman who'd dress as a fool, who'd refuse to look attractive, she was seen as loose, wanton, and willing to fuck for money. Another friend, Steve, wears a wolf costume to Burning Man each year and fucks his brains out because, he says, people see him as less than human. Something wild.
By now, the backs of my knees hurt from taking kicks. My kidneys ache from getting punched, and my shoulder blades from pitched rocks. My hands are running with sweat. My feet are sore from too much walking on concrete. On Pine Street young women drive past, waving from cars and screaming, 'We love you…'
All these people behind their own masks: their sunglasses and cars and fashions and haircuts. Young men drive past, screaming, 'Goddamn fucking FAGS…'
By now, I don't give a shit. This dog could walk around this way forever. Walking taller. Blind and deaf to people's shit. I don't need to wave, to pander and pose with kids for pictures. I'm just a dog smoking a cigarette outside Pottery Barn. I lean back, one leg lifted against the facade of Tiffany and Company. I'm just the Dalmatian making a cell-phone call in front of Old Navy. It's the kind of cool, a feeling of being self-contained, that white guys can live a lifetime without.
By now it's sweating hot. It's late afternoon, and FAO Schwarz is almost deserted. Inside the big glass doors, a young guy is dressed as a toy soldier in a red tailcoat with a double row of brass buttons and a towering black helmet. The escalators are empty. The Barbie Shop is empty. The toy soldier plays with a radio-controlled race car, alone and trapped inside on the first sunny day Seattle has seen in months.
The toy soldier looks up from his job, at the dog and bear coming through the door, and he smiles. Ignoring his race car, letting it drive into a wall, the soldier says, 'You guys rock!' He says, 'You SO totally rule.'
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
