If the Chocolate Mountains were a spine laid sideways, Jacob Ray Taylor--J.R., of course, to those who know him--would be found down in the lumbar.
The mountains trend in a languid southeasterly direction from Riverside County across Imperial County to just this side of the Mexican frontier. They are as remote and gloriously unsettled as California gets, a rolling savannah of spiny scrub trees, badlands, lava fields and the Chocolate Mountain Aeriel Gunnery Range, 456,000 acres set aside for the U.S. Navy, Marines, National Guard, visiting NATO wings and various helicopter detachments.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday December 11, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 38 words Type of Material: Correction
Gunnery range -- In today's Los Angeles Times Magazine, the cover and the article inside refer to a target range in Riverside and Imperial counties, the Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range, as the Chocolate Mountain Aeriel Gunnery Range.
They are why Taylor's directions to his spread, relayed by cellphone in an Arkansas twang that sways between raspy and sing-songy, include a distracting caveat: "If you see the 'Danger: Bombing Range' signs, you've gone too far."
He and his wife, Lorelei, own 10 acres spilling over with trailers, shotgun shacks, seven dogs, 45 chickens and roosters, even more cats and a cache of spent bullets and bomb fins. To the north is where Patton's Third Army trained in the early 1940s. To the west is where B-29s dropped mock-ups of "Little Boy" and "Fat Man," the atomic bombs destined for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, over the cognac-colored Salton Sea. The thrust of the blades of military choppers on modern-day missions over the Chocolates has been known to bend antennae on the Taylors' property.
Perhaps there's some good reason that J.R. settled here, 62 miles from potable water. To begin with, he's an ex-soldier. A "Mud Marine" who served three tours in Vietnam, one in Lebanon, then a stint with a unit in Colombia, during, he says, "the first drug war there." After leaving what he calls the "black" or covert ops world, he found work with Red Adair, the famed oil field firefighter. "That owed to my knowledge of explosives," Taylor explains.
But eventually he returned to making a living from war, or from the rehearsals for it, scrounging the range for reclaimable bomb and missile metals--primarily aluminum and brass--then selling them to a local yard for as much as $500 a ton.
If the work wasn't exactly legal, it wasn't exactly immoral, either. Scrappers like Taylor who roamed the Chocolates in days gone by respected a code: steering clear when the range was "hot," namely when maneuvers were being conducted, and maintaining a quietly amiable relationship with the military authorities.
"I got along with them," Taylor claims. "But then again, they didn't see me and I didn't see them."
