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Beautiful Dixie Canyon
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Call Us at (480) 483 3537
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The only reason I have any interest in the wild and in nature is because of this man, my maternal grandfather W.E. "Bill" Carty. My brother Sam and I spent the last two summers of Bill Carty's life working with him on his 654-acre farm in the Columbia River floodplain in Southwest Washington. I cannot say enough about this great man, but only hope that this photo conveys a sense of this extraordinary person. He loved the work of the Greatest Architect of them all, tended his place as if it were a park, was honest to a fault, protected the weak and taught my brother and I a million things we will never forget. Bill Carty's dream was to live in a beautiful place and to be surrounded by people beautiful in love. That, as you may have adduced, is also my dream. |
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This is my mother, God rest her soul. She died just before my eleventh birthday, and the great good fortune in that was that my brother Sam and I were sent to live with her parents, Bill and Mary Carty. She was a beautiful person and I believe that Bill and Mary Carty made a special effort to care for Sam and I because they loved their daughter so. |
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This is my father, L.S. "Sam" Shoen, on the left, with his hand outstretched in front of Bill Carty, having just received his law school diploma in 1956, a year before my mother died. I am on the far right. My father was a great man and a entrepreneurial genius, if any man can be called genius. Like Bill Carty, he was an extraordinarily hard worker who helped people and couldn't stomach bullshit. I have often thought that, in today's complex and contrived world, so endeared with propaganda and deceit, these two are better off gone. My father strove to make dreams possible for others, including me, and for this and for his extraordinary courage, I am eternally grateful. |
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The "back" of my grandfather's house when built in the early 1920s soon became the front, because the river traffic (Columbia and Lake River) on the "front" quickly yielded to automobile road traffic accessed from the back. This early photo shows my grandfather on the original back porch. In the summer, my brother Sam and I slept outside on the second-floor porch on the right side of the house, obscured by a tree in this photo. |
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My mother in the original front yard in the early 1940s. For centuries, the Columbia River had spilled over its banks during early summers but, by 1963, upstream dams had learned to time water releases to control the river level and prevent flooding. Pioneer homes such as my grandparents' accessed the Columbia over its "high water" floodplain and tributaries via small boats.The high water reached to about 60' west of where my mother is standing. My brother Sam and I cruised all over in ancient rowboats armed with Grahamcrakers and a 12-gauge shotgun or .22 rifle. |
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This was Bill Carty's farm, established by his father after he returned from the Idaho Gold Rush. The "big" barn is on the right. There was another, slightly smaller barn immediately behind it, called "the little barn". In the center of the photo is the house, to its right is the cream seperator building and to the right of that, just to the left of the barn, is the hired hands' house. To the immediate left of the house is the woodshed and to the far left is the chicken coop. In the foreground is the upper meadow. The hill and trees rising in the furthest background are on the far side of the Columbia River. I lifted plenty of hay bales from this field and once spent two weeks shoveling manure to spread on these fields. It was an instructive experience. It made me better able to recognize bullshit and its close relatives, propaganda and mind control. |
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