User:Johnnyftaylor



Life Story – Johnny Taylor - The Wheelchair Wanderer

The Beginning -

I was born on Oct 29 1955 in Waco Texas. Son of John Frank Taylor and Annell Degrassi Taylor, Frank: Born May 27, 1931, and Annell: Born August 23, 1929.

My parents were from Amarillo Texas. My dad came from a poor family and he was the youngest of 8. My mom was from a rich family her father was a railroad man and her mom’s sister was extremely rich in oil and cattle.

From what I learned in growing up my father was a “rebel” he was an accomplished boxer with golden glove awards, raced motorcycles, and in my mind, he seemed bigger than life and very cool like John Wayne or even James Dean or Marlon Brando.

My father was determined to be “Somebody” unlike all his older siblings whom I was raised to believe “never amounted to anything and never would”. He joined the Air Force Cadets and moved from Amarillo to somewhere in central Texas and later sent for my mom and they married. I was their first child. At 10 months old I got polio. This is easy to relate to because I have never known a life without crutches, braces, and surgeries. I don’t know at what age it dawned on me that I was “Not Normal”.

We moved from there to Tinker AFB in Oklahoma where my father got his pilot training flying T-33 jets. I think this is when he truly became enamored with flying.

The next memories I have are from Spain. I must have been 5 or 6 because I started 1st grade in a small town about 13 miles from Sevilla in the south of Spain. I remember the house or mansion as it seemed to me. It was a gated property with a large garden in the front. As you walked in the front gate you saw a large path toward the house and saw the steps up to the house, but the front was a huge garden with symmetrical plots lined with brick and paths wandering through the whole thing. At my age, it was a wonderland of trails right in my front yard. When I say front yard I mean a 4-foot wall with a foot of wrought iron on the top, almost “fortress” type. I think having that type of house was a status symbol among the community, but it could have been the construction standard at the time. That being said, our house seemed to be a castle in a small neighborhood at the base of a very large hill.

Life after Pamela -

After Pamela died I essentially became a zombie for three or four months wandering the Pacific Northwest and visiting my daughter in Portland on many occasions. I went to a clinic in Portland back in February to get some psychiatric help with my grief and depression, and it never really helped, but I had to get a primary care Dr. to be seen. My regular doctor is in Pahrump, Nevada but I had not seen him in a couple of years.

At the request of the clinic doctor, I was advised to get a PSA test. The high PSA result prompted me to get a prostate biopsy at the end of July, which came out positive for cancer. I figured this was going to be the "Silver Bullet", but the doctor says that it is not life-threatening and we are taking the "watch and see" approach as it does not require treatment at this time. I have a virtual follow-up in April there in Portland. My sister left mid-May after being here for a month and I hung out with my daughter and helped her do projects around her new house and did some minor work on the van. By mid-June, it was getting kind of hot and Jessica was getting ready to go on vacation so I came down to Tillamook and stayed in an RV park next to the airport where Pam and I stayed from July through Sept 2020. That was the last place we camped together, and of course, she was in hospice at the time. The RV park hosts and I had become friends and Tony the host was going to help me do the van remodel I had been planning since Pam passed. I did a lot of work. I took out the queen-sized bed, put in a smaller bed, put in additional counters and storage, installed a 24-volt refrigerator, put in a water holding tank for a sink, and have a sink in a countertop with all my cooking things set up.

As luck would have it, after about a week and a half, I'm traveling to the store in town and the transmission on the van went out and it turns out the whole transmission needed to be replaced. I got to tell you at that point the depression hit me pretty hard. I ended up having to get a brand new transmission and ended up waiting until the 22nd of July when they finally got the transmission installed. The timing was good because my prostate biopsy was scheduled for the end of July. That biopsy was not a fun thing. I don't want to do it again but I'm sure I'll have to at some point.

I went back to Tillamook and got most of the remodeling done on the van and ended up staying in Tillamook for quite some time. I stayed in Tillamook until the 21st of September went to say bye to Jessica, and left Portland headed to meet up with my cousin by October 23rd in Golden, Colorado. I headed up through Washington and camped and stopped off at a place called The Pink House Recreation Site in Orofino, Idaho. It is a BLM site on the Snake River. This was my first real excursion away from Oregon and Washington since she passed away so I was a bit nervous and apprehensive. I stayed there in Idaho up until the beginning of October and I was headed towards Wyoming and right on the border of Oregon and Idaho, the new tranny started blowing fluid. Turns out the new transmission was faulty and there I was stuck in a redneck town staying in a fleabag Motel 6 for a week while they had to have another new transmission shipped in from Indiana. I was numb at this point and frankly terrified.

After that, I headed towards Colorado through southern Wyoming. Needless to say, I was gun-shy as to the reliability of my van. The visit with my cousin and his wife in Golden was one of the most spectacular times I have had in my life. They put me up in a fancy hotel for nine days, they showed me all their beautiful area of Colorado, I got to see the Red Rocks Park and Amphitheater, I got to see the Sierras, they wined and dined me, they gave me gifts, they we're just the most gracious and loving people. Not only that. They gave me a surprise dinner party for my birthday. They even flew my daughter from Portland to Denver for the party. It was truly amazing.

After that, I traveled and visited some friends in Lucerne Valley down below Barstow at the San Bernardino Mountains for a couple of weeks. They were friends we had met two years prior in Oregon and they had bought some property there the year we were running away from the pandemic. We had stayed with them for a month on our last trip together around the country.

I then migrated towards Quartzsite, Arizona, and met a friend of Pam's that is one of the first ladies we met when we started boondocking. She wanted to see our cat and dog again. She has a cat and she and Pam had become pretty close, so I visited her for a couple of days and then I migrated down to Yuma. I stayed at a place west of the Yuma Army Proving Grounds, some BLM land called Squaw Lake for 10 days and now I am here in the Enzo Borrego Desert. My friend Tony from Tillamook is getting certified in an ultra-light and was going to be training down here however the winds might prevent that for now. My plan over the next couple of days is to go to Joshua Tree and maybe camp out in Joshua Tree for a couple of weeks or longer. Other than that I'm carrying on the nomadic lifestyle.

Salton Sea Trip To Be Continued.