THE EXTREME CYCLISTS OF THE NAVAJO NATION
Rodeo is a common passion on the Navajo Nation—a reservation the size of West Virginia that stretches across New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona—and a couple of years ago, when he was thirteen, Nigel James was an up-and-coming calf roper. But then his horse got pregnant and he couldn’t ride her, so he turned to his bike and started building downhill trails and ramps around his parents’ place. Soon he was riding his bike the way a roper rides a horse: in brief bursts of speed that give way to daredevil maneuvers. This school of cycling is called enduro, and Nigel had a gift for it.
The summer before, Nigel joined a long bike ride on the reservation called the Tour de Sih Hasin—three hundred miles over seven days, much of it on rough dirt roads and hills, in the punishing July heat. On the second-to-last day, he wanted to quit. His mother said that was O.K. But the next day he pressed on, becoming the youngest rider ever to finish the tour.
Nigel wasn’t the only rider for whom the long days pushing over the severe landscape served as an inspiring test of endurance. Claudia Jackson, who leads the annual ride, organized the Tour de Sih Hasin as a suicide-awareness event. There was only one psychiatrist on the reservation, she told me, and, “In our five communities we had seven suicides in three months.” “Sih Hasin” means “hope” in Navajo, and several riders have told Jackson that overcoming the arduous physical challenge of the tour made them feel they had a reason to live.
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Even though it choked me up...
