By Guest Contributor Alice C.
My husband and I spend all the time we can on the back of a motorcycle, and let’s just say we’re adrenaline junkies with no right to expect NOT to die in a motorcycle crash. My altar occupies the top shelf of a full-height pyramidal bookshelf in the main area of our house: I always store our helmets and riding gloves on the shelf below it, and I have a sticker of La Santíssima astride a bike on the back of my helmet. While the statue on my altar is the Siete Potencias version, I talk with La Reversible on the road to deflect the attention of radar detectors etc and protect from accidents. As it happens, the bike in this story (our very favorite bike) is black with red accents.
We were riding on a freshly paved freeway after a light rainfall. Not seeing our mostly-black bike against black tar on a gray day, a work van towing a trailer moved into our lane as we began to pass it on the right at about 90 mph. To avoid a collision, my husband used the breakdown lane as an escape route – but all the greasy sealant in the fresh pavement had rinsed off the travel lanes onto the shoulder of the road, leaving a surface so slippery that a man who stopped afterward almost fell down when he got out of his truck.
The back tire immediately slid out from under us and the bike went down at full speed, luckily launching us off of it first. What brought us down also saved us: if the pavement had been dry it would have been a really rough fall, but it was SO slippery that we slid along the shoulder on our backs for literally hundreds of feet before eventually running into the grass and rolling uncomfortably but not harmfully maybe fifty or a hundred feet downhill. If we had hit a sign post, a tree, or a guardrail too early in that slide it could easily have been lethal but it was smooth sailing.
Meanwhile the bike crossed two lanes of interstate traffic without causing any further accidents (to be fair, traffic was quite light), and landed 100+ feet into the median strip. Judging by the damage it sustained to its top side I think it flipped over on its final journey (if you zoom in on the picture of the crashed bike, you can also see the “But Did You Die?” keychain hanging upside down, also in Reversible colors!) Most people can’t say they stood up and walked away immediately after a 90 mph motorcycle crash, but we both did. I got a bit of road rash and bruised hips, and my husband’s shoulder is a bit sore, but that’s it. So it’s enough of a miracle to be walking and talking, but there are a couple other odd bits to the story.
First, I have a VERY clear tactile memory of sliding down the breakdown lane with my right arm wrapped around my husband’s torso, holding the back of his head off the pavement with my shoulder. I can remember feeling his ribs inside my forearm and the effort of keeping my shoulder hunched up to support his head. My husband not only does not share this memory but claims it would have been completely impossible for me to catch him as we fell (he remembers seeing me spinning around in circles a few feet away from him as we slid). Neither of us feels like we have any holes in our memory of the incident, so the only explanation I can come up with that makes us both “right” is that I had some kind of out-of-body experience where I gained the perspective of the forces protecting him.
Second, about a week after the accident I was in my office, opened my laptop, and accidentally touched one fingertip on the left hand of a Santa Muerte figurine I created myself this summer. Her fingers are made of porcupine quills**: the quill stabbed my hand, causing me to jerk back, but the quill’s barb stuck in my skin so that pulled the whole thing over and it came apart in many pieces, though no pieces broke and I’ll be able to reassemble her. My own left hand is the first thing that hit the ground in that accident, and that’s not the first time that it seems like she’s taken a hit for me after an incident that could have gone much worse.
When we were in Mexico last winter, the lighting in our room was unpleasantly bright so my husband went to a botánica and came back with three Santa Muerte veladoras – black, red, and white. A few nights later we had a pretty tense encounter with a half a dozen municipales, late at night with no one else around. They got us for a thousand pesos of beer money but let us walk. The same night after we returned to our room, the black votive candle spontaneously exploded. Last spring we got hit-and-run at an intersection and ended up in a high speed chase on back roads until we got the cops there. A few weeks later, a Santa Muerte book that I had ordered arrived accompanied with a black obsidian tile engraved with her image. When I pulled the tile from the box, it seemed like it jumped out of my hands to fall on the floor and shatter into a jillion shards.
I feel like I should add that this piece, like many of my artworks, uses parts from a number of animals – squirrel skin, wild turkey feathers, cat ribs, owl talons, porcupine quills, and various deer bones (as well as driftwood, a barro negro skull, and .38 special rounds, with a candle holder so that the head lights up from within). All the animal parts I use are collected without harming animals for the purpose: they are forest/roadkill finds, or from animals harvested for food by my husband or my son. The cat was our own pet, who had to be euthanized at the age of eighteen. I cover such things in wire mesh and rocks out in the woods to protect them from scavengers, and let the insects do the work of cleaning them. Somewhat macabre maybe, but I’m not a sociopath…
Most Holy Death 