Page 65 - Ninety Miles From Nowhere

grease job, an oil change, it was ready to go.
I stayed in Dad’s cabin until time to go to Oklahoma to receive my belated degree. While there I had a visit from old family friends, Mr. and Mrs. L. F. Alby from Oklahoma City. They had lived across the street from my parents when I was born in Ringgold, Texas. The Tom Blake who helped George build Dad’s cabin was Mrs. Alby’s brother.
My parents had not given me a middle name so I began using Alby as my second name when I was about five years old. When I was a young girl I often tried to decided what I should call myself when I became famous - Anabel Howell, Anabel A. Howell, or Anabel Alby Howell.
When my father was nearing retirement age, he began looking into his own birth records, and later into the matter of birth certificates for all members of the family. The younger children had been issued birth certificates when they were born, but the older ones had problems. My birth was recorded as “female child born to Mr. and Mrs. A. H. Howell” - no name at all.
When my Dad wrote them to give them my name to complete their records, he included the “Alby”, and that’s the way it appears on my birth certificate today.
I’ll wager I’m the only person who ever lived who named herself on her birth certificate!
In his younger days, Mr. Alby was a hunter, mainly birds. Mrs. Alby was an expert at preparing all kinds of wild game. While they were visiting me we had squirrel, rabbit
and porcupine. I had never eaten porcupine before but ours was a young one and the meat was very pink and fresh looking. Old porcupine is as greasy as an o’possum and tastes of turpentine, since it lives entirely off the bark of the pine trees.
As I remember it, soaking the meat overnight in salt water was Mrs’s Alby’s
method of removing the wild taste. Then she cooked it in the oven as smothered
steak. Go-o-od!
In the national forests porcupines were once protected from hunting because they were the only animals that could be killed without a weapon by a lost traveler - just a stick or rock would do. There was no such protection in New Mexico forests. On the contrary, the CCC boys at the camp west of Magdalena spent all day long shooting them with 22 rifles. They were killing the trees by gnawing off the bark in a belt around each tree.
Ruins of Old Fort Ojo Caliente (photo by Mary McCracken)