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Reply to "Fingernails, New Mexico - A Remote Location"

Blood Alley has again earned its illustrious name --
at 10 PM last Monday evening a young State Trooper came round a blind bend without his seat-belt on, and flew through the windshield as his black-and-white plowed into a DEAD COW lying on the roadway -- that some thoughtful previous traveller had left behind. Not that you can call anyone from Blood Alley. It's a cell-phone dead zone.

"Though the officer tried to avoid the cow, his State Police car struck it and rolled over several times, ejecting him onto the roadway.

"A northbound Nissan Ultima then struck him, and the driver of that vehicle remained on the scene. He told investigators that within five minutes another northbound vehicle, a Jeep SUV, came on at high speed and struck the officer again, dragging him some distance, and then fled the scene."

The officer had served a tour of duty in Iraq and was still in local active duty reserves in the Marines.

Brought down by errant beef on the hoof and a pair of out-of-control gas-guzzlers.

Adjunct article: "Loose livestock on highways cause 700-900 accidents per year in New Mexico -- primarily mule deer, pronghorn elk, black bear and mountain lion cause fatalities."

This article was embellished with a horrific image of the hind legs of a deer sticking out of
a windshield, at just such an angle you knew it was face to face with a defunct motorist.

Let us not forget however a sometimes greater terror: WHITE PLASTIC SHOPPING BAGS...
those small flimsy things fly across the road constantly and stick in the cactus and
trees everywhere... and send me into a swivet when I'm driving late at night.

I had just watched "CRASH" again, twice, on a Cronenberg kick -- when this accident was in the news.
Violent choreography well-visualized, a seat-beltless victim cannonballing through a windshield. We all have this fetishism for the car, speed, traffic accidents...
but can't admit it. The car cannot be given up. No matter how much gas costs, we
have to speed at 70 MPH to go wherever...
"the modification of the human body by technology," seems how cool --
as long as you end up just modified.

Just to consider this 27-year old Dad of two, handsome young Hispanic shot out of
his primo vehicle...tangling with beef, battered twice by crazed gasoline engines...
after surviving the blood-for-oil nightmare. Shot out onto the haunted maelstrom made of the curves of Blood Alley's free American roadway.

The next day there are chalk lines and arrows and encircled shapes on the death-spot...
here's where the cow was, another shape, a leg? a circle for a head...
the asphalt glittering broken glass spectacular in the morning sun.
Already the pathetic cross is up, covered with flowers.

Two days later I'm driving out of town around 5 PM, there's what looks like 100s of cops in full dress blacks standing out on that bloody bend. As I head south I pass dozens more cop cars, all heading for the next-to-the-road memorial service, as it turns out.

So this week the Police Blotter is full of reports of calls made to police on that day that were never answered.
Well what the hell, just another bunch of the same overdoses, same wives beating the same old husbands, crank calls about people smoking pot, and needles in the shrubs at Long John Silver's. And Espanola's "Foremost Drunk" hassling people again at Lowe's SuperSave.
Was anyone going to speed to save their sorry asses
Last edited by S'tan
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