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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 Beastmaster, and that gave me some ideas. I thought a castle would be good because it would be secure. Then I also noticed houses were depreciating with time where a castle would appreciate with time and not rot away."

By now Roger's built three castles-from his first, which took five weeks, to his latest, which is for sale at a million-dollar price. "Basically, I thought it would be fun," he says. "Fun to live in. Fun for people to look at. And then the fact that it would be there permanently, and you could pass it on for generations."

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 «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.