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The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Rezneck Riders
00:27:02
The Navajo Nation covers over twenty-seven thousand square miles in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico; it’s an area roughly the size of West Virginia. Vincent Salabye grew up there, in a community troubled by memories of conquest by the United States Army and by persistent poverty, addiction, and despair. To grapple with these hereditary demons, Salabye came up with a novel idea: he hopped on a bike. As a kid, he once rode all the way to Texas and back: almost three thousand miles. “That's my horse,” says Vincent. “It takes me places. That's always ingrained in me. That's how my mind-set is, trying to explore the lands that I always grew up on.” Now a new crop of cyclists on the Navajo Nation are following Salabye’s impulse, and making a new kind of bike riding called Enduro their own. It’s a dangerous, difficult, and extremely intense form of high-speed downhill racing. Enduro has given some Navajo men a new way to connect with their ancient tribal lands and to defy the hard prospects...
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A
From One World Trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC studios and the New Yorker.
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B
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. This week, cycling fans turn once again to the world's biggest cycling competition, the Tour de France. It's a grueling 21 stage race that takes about three weeks to ride. But another cycling event was also taking place this week, and it's a much quieter affair. Over seven days, a group of Navajo cyclists, many of them kids, are riding 300 miles across the vast Navajo Nation, the reservation that stretches across New Mexico, Utah and Arizona. It's a rugged, hot landscape and maybe not the most obvious place to stage a multi day bike ride. But for these young bikers, the landscape has become an endurance test that keeps them close to their Navajo heritage. We sent staff writer Filip Graveic out to the reservation a few months ago to find out more about the cycling.
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C
Man.
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D
As a kid, you want to do something? I was looking at my little bus window, imagining myself riding a bicycle, right? Bouncing around in there with all that dust and everything. Sometimes I, even with that dust on the window, I would draw a little bike and then just two wheels and the handlebar and just watch it. And as the road is going by, just see this bike just flying through the area. So where I'm from, where my can is from, is up this canyon way at the very end where it starts.
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E
Vincent Salabe tells me this story as we sit on the lip of Canyon de Chelly, which is this spectacularly beautiful spot. It's kind of a mini Grand Canyon. Vincent rode his bike out here this evening. He comes from around here. His family does. His ancestors have for as long as anybody can remember. He's 38 now, but he took up biking as a kid.
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D
We were in a tough situation with my family about that time. My dad had left, my mom was in between jobs. And during that time, a new man was in the house, very alcoholic, abusive. And I just didn't want to be there, you know, I just wanted to get out, you know. I was 13 years old and I went on a bike ride from here. A teacher sponsored it with the school. 17 of us got on the road and made a ride all the way down to Texas on mountain bikes from Walmart.
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E
How many miles?
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D
When I checked it, it was around 3,000 miles or something like that.
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E
Yeah, yeah.
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D
And we were kids, man. I was the youngest of the group.
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E
That was 25 years ago. And Vincent still seems a bit blown Away by what he accomplished and just how far he pedaled that he kept going. He says he just really didn't want to stop the bike. Felt like where he belonged. It clicked. It was something about him and about where he was coming from.
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D
My representation of that is, you know, that's my horse. You know, that's my horse that takes me places. So that's always ingrained in me is like, that's how my mindset, just trying to explore the lands that I always grew up on.
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E
So a couple of years ago, when Vincent heard that another long ride was being organized on the rez, he jumped at the chance to join. This one was a little more tame. Really, anything would be more tame. Just 300 miles over seven days. It was called the Tour de Sihassen.
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So the center right here kind of comes down. There's a cattle trail that goes all the way up the mountain. Our bike route is out there.
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Sihassen means hope in Navajo. The tour was Claudia Jackson's idea.
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In our five communities, we had seven suicides within three months.
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Claudia imagined this multi day trip where young people would not just get to ride a lot, but also to camp out every night so they would really get to know each other.
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C
You know, that sort of brings us together. We talk about things. We might not talk about that issue, but we get people to talk.
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E
She decided to make the Tour of Sihasen a suicide awareness event. And that first year, she realized she was definitely onto something.
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C
I had two individuals on the ride. One was a young boy. He. Yeah, he was telling us a story that he had tried, and now he realizes that there's a reason for his life. And then being on the bike ride really made him think. Because you're out there in the heat and you're just. You're really struggling physically and mentally. People really think out there. And one ride we did, this lady came up to me and she started crying and telling me about walking into her home and her son was, you know, had committed and she didn't know where to go. And that's when we realized on the entire Navajo Nation, we only had one clinician, one psychiatrist. Just, you know, psychology. Yeah, that's when a lot of things started happening to bring in more. More discussion. Because with our tribe and our people, they don't talk about those things. They consider it taboo. If you talk about it, that's taboo. But for us, we knew we had to.
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Claudia started thinking that there should be more than a once a year event. She started thinking about organizing a cycling team and she started talking with a former professional cyclist turned coach. Not a Navajo, but he lived at the edge of the reservation in Gallup, New Mexico, named Scott Nedham. Yeah, that was great. That was so special. I'd met Scott in Rwanda a while back. He was there helping to coach a group of young Rwandans who were becoming professional cyclists. That team, Team Rwanda became a real success story. Two riders had gone to the Olympics. So Scott knew firsthand how cycling develops resilience and can even restore a sense of self to people who've experienced deep trauma. As it happened, a couple of the Rwandan riders, Nathan Bukusenge and Rafiki Uimana, were visiting the States, and Scott asked them to join him on a road trip to check out the cycling scene on the reservation. When Vincent met Nathan and Rafiki, he didn't say much. He just took them for a ride. Nathan and Rafiki are tough riders. Nathan rode in the Rio Olympics.
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D
I stopped because it's the first time we start.
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E
I don't think they were quite prepared for the terrain.
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D
Different soyuz.
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E
We'll be coming down right here.
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F
Look, I'll show you.
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D
I'll come down.
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Vincent just hopped on his bike and they hopped on theirs. And he led them riding up and over and down between boulders at the edge of the canyon, then shooting off along the rim where they appeared in silhouette. When the sunset started to get gaudy behind them, they stopped to take it all in. And Vincent started talking about the history of his people.
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D
United States government gathered us up, babies and all, whatever we could carry, did away with our livestock. Right then and there, bam, bam, bam, and said, we're gonna go in that direction. And no chains involved. But at gunpoint, the people didn't know where they were going. Ended up. They call it Hue Te. I just know it by Navajo name, Huerte. Fort Sumner, that's where it is. We're taking it all the way to Fort Sumner. They called that the long walk. And very similar to what the Cherokee went through with the Trail of Tears.
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And everyone brought up the boarding schools where so many Navajo kids had been shipped when they were young to be anglicized, Christianized, deracinated. Vincent was sent away.
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I guess you say it grows on you. Yeah, I'm a really short tempered person and I just find that I'm mean, I'm angry. And this comes with all of the care that you're given there. You lose track of your surroundings, right? And pretty soon you're just like, hey, it's just me here. And everybody comes individualized the purpose of our prayer is to remind us of all that is around us. Hayo Koth is the early morning light. When you go out there, you see it, it's white, right? And then from there, everything grow. When we're out here and we gather as a family and we have these ceremonies and we sing, you become one right there. And from there, we try to encourage one another to stay strong and go against all of the things that are going on around us and that are trying to keep us from growing. And it's really hard to live out here. You know, it's tough.
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When Vincent rode the Tour de Sahasan in 2016, he saw himself and all the kids pushing themselves to hang in there. The youngest rider in particular struck a chord in him. A 12 year old named Nigel James, who was just pedaling his heart out and made it through the whole 300 miles.
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I saw how good he was and I said, why not just get this kid a chance?
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E
Well, he's like the age you were when you rode to Texas.
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D
Perfect. Yes. I see myself a lot in him because at that age, I wish. I wish I had somebody to lead the way.
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E
Where Vincent led Nigel was to the kind of riding we'd seen him doing at the edge of Canyon de Chelly, the kind that he felt was truest to who he was and where he was, like he was on horseback. This new form of riding belongs to an entirely different sport than conventional cycling. Enduro, it's called. And it involves going alone hard and fast down very, very challenging terrain. It's not a question of pedaling hard. It's more like downhill ski racing on an obstacle course of hard rock and gravel with lots of jumping off cliffs and over crevices. In just 10 years or so, enduro has become a whole world. There are international competition circuits, professional riders, endorsement deals. You can watch some of these hotshots on YouTube videos if you've got a stomach for watching people who appear to be plunging to their deaths. Nigel took to enduro with a passion. So we set out the next morning to see Nigel, your native broadcast enterprise radio station. We drove and we drove and drove and drove. The Navajo nation is big. We put 1100 miles on our truck in three days. And we listened to a lot of radio. We are really out there. Yeah, we're on this, like, rutted dirt road. We're looking to get to Nigel's house. But it's been a long, long time since we passed, even on the paved road, another car or a house. And here looks like we're coming up into a sizable corral. We came to a horse corral and beyond it to a house with a lot of heavy equipment around it and a traditional Navajo structure being built. A heavy log roundhouse called a hogan. There was a teenage boy there with a ponytail rocketing around on an orange enduro bike. That was Nigel. The Rwandans immediately recognized him as one of their own.
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This is like a Bimix truck.
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Oh, yeah, Bimix right here is a technical one. Back there.
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All cyclists together. It's connection cycling.
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It's a good connection. It was hard to believe that Nigel had only started riding a bike two years ago.
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G
Then I met Vincent and then he started taking me all over the place. Did my first race September, I think Flagstaff, Enduro. Got my first podium over there. The second race in Tucson.
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And Nigel was underselling himself. He'd been winning a lot of the races, though. He sounded like what he was, a boy, very much at home in his parents house, hanging out, just riding his bike around the yard. People kept telling us he was also a really disciplined and fanatical rider. He never seemed to get off his bike. He had the habit of sort of pulling up, talking for a few minutes, and then he'd just stand up on the pedals and shoot off. He'd built ramps and jumps all around the house. So he really felt that he was at home in a deep sense. Like this was his place, he'd made it his place. But he wasn't just a kid who was serious about biking. It turned out he was also a kid who was really serious about the impact of his biking on his land.
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G
Yeah, we're able to build a lot of things because there's so much land here, but we also don't want to do too much because we could be causing erosion. Which is why I try to ride mainly on the rock or the hard packed.
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E
As we were talking, Nigel's dad stepped in. My mother in law, she went to go get the sheep for you. You guys are gonna kill it. She said to sharpen your knife. By you guys, he meant the Rwandans. Apparently the family, when they realized they were having visitors from Africa, had wanted to make them feel welcome and at home and had come up with this idea of inviting them to slaughter an animal as their honored guests. The only question was, which was gonna die today, a goat or a sheep? I don't know how to kill a sheep. I don't. Yes. The Rwandans were like, we don't slaughter goats. Like, well, these people are really far out. They want to go get it. Yeah, go for a ride, man. And then. And then they're gonna bring the sheep up here. Okay. So Nigel took off with Nathan and rafiki trying to keep up with him. When the knives came out. The goat. It was a goat in the end, a kid goat. The Rwandans were nowhere to be seen. Nigel's family made quick work of the slaughter. After binding the animal's hoofs and brushing its neck with a sprig of juniper, his grandmother slit its throat. Nigel stripped off the skin, and the severed head was on the grill in about 15 minutes.
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It takes a lot of time.
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Meanwhile, inside the house, Nigel's mother and her sisters and their mother and her sisters and some of the younger children were gathered in the kitchen preparing the feast. The really strong feeling that you got right away, and it just deepened through the long hours, the afternoon and evening we spent there was that this was a guy who was the opposite of all the alienation we've been hearing about amongst the youth. He was loved. He was cherished. He was supported. He was encouraged. He was being homeschooled in large part to make sure that he grew up speaking Navajo, respecting the ways of the elders, and to protect him and shelter him and spare him so much of the grief that we were hearing about as a sort of given of much of reservation life. At sunset on the black mesa, Nigel's grandparents, his grandfather on horseback, his grandmother, walking nearby, started herding the sheep up past the house.
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Our ancestors, they roam this place, so we don't want to go any other place but here. And our kids, grandkids, some live out in towns and cities. But for us old folks, we don't want to be out there. I don't. I like to roam without any fence as far as I can, this way, that way, out here. But I'm not getting any younger, so I would like to have, like, running water because of my age. So that's some of the things that we face up here.
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For all of Nigel's family's attachment to their land and their traditions, it was striking how much they also completely supported him, taking off into the world of enduro competitions, which is really a different world, a white, anglo world. But then at one of these competitions in Utah, a funny thing happened because, you know, there's not a whole lot of people of color at these places. That's Nigel's mom. They met these guys called the yazis.
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So we automatically spotted them.
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We said our yates.
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Which is hello.
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And naboo.
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Yeah, the yazzies, Jarrett and Terrence. Those guys are willing to take me in, train me, improve my technical ability. Yeah, but their place is crazy. They just have, like, big boulders everywhere. Then they have, like, woodwork connecting them. Technical features. Crazy stuff. I don't even want to try.
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E
Obviously, I wanted to meet these crazy yazzies. But when I asked if we could go out there the next day, it was the only time I felt from Nigel's family, who'd been so welcoming, that maybe we were trespassing a little. I let it go and we settled down to our feast of goat stew and pozole. And the sky got dark and the stars came out. It was only much later, as we were getting ready to leave, that Nigel's dad took me aside and told me he'd got the word from the Yazees. It wasn't exactly an invitation. It was more like, if you want to tag along with Nigel, we won't run you off our land. The Yazees, of course, lived hundreds of miles away. So we drove and we drove and the road led us south and east into a kind of vast gravel pan of a plane that stretched out in all directions. It really felt like the inside of a kiln. It was hot just before noon when the road up ahead appeared to be evaporating in the heat waves. And we came around a bend. There was a pickup truck waiting that flashed its lights and headed out ahead of us. We followed and wound up in a yard surrounded by big red rocks. There was a tremendous amount of surrounding a rather modest house. Weightlifting gear and broken engines and all manner of scrap metal all over the place. And there were the Yazzies. They were big guys, cousins. The younger one, Terrence, quite mild mannered. And then came Jared. There was nothing mild about him. He pretty much charged at us. Marvin, Nigel's dad, had a sort of amused look like I told you they were crazy. And he made introductions. We got a few guests here.
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F
Sup, man? Jerk.
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E
Nathan and Rafiki.
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F
Rafiki? Yes, that is an actual name.
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Did he just call Rafiki a baboon? He seemed awfully happy to see him. And it took a second for everyone to register that Jared was making a Lion King reference.
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F
All cross country.
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E
Yeah.
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F
Nice, dude. You guys kick ass.
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E
I saw some of that shit Jared blew up here. Right here. This was his father's house. And like Vincent and Nigel, it turned out he'd first got into riding a bike when he signed up for a multi day ride in high school. An anti drug ride. He liked riding on the road, but the nearest pavement was miles away. And what really clicked was mountain biking. It was the very early days of the sport.
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F
All I knew is there was tires and dirt. It was fun. It's kind of like dirt biking, but without the motor.
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He was good at it too. But in his early 20s, he got.
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F
Distracted, got in trouble with the law, got away from cycling and everything altogether for a while. Had to go do some time.
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German said he had eight DUIs by the time he went to prison. When he got out, he had a girlfriend who asked him, if you're not drinking, what are you gonna do? He said he used to love biking, so she bought him a bike and he started riding again, working out his anger on his pedals. He started going to races, and he started seeing people riding mountain bikes in a way that was more and more like he liked it more like the rodeo aggressive, adrenaline junkie.
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F
Rode horses fast, did everything hard and fast out here. You know, road bulls, fucking rode dirt bikes, quads, you know, wrecked seven trucks.
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E
So.
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Brought that all back here.
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And Jared wanted to ride with other people, but it seemed to him that the few serious cyclists around didn't want anything to do with some Navajo guy.
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F
Those white fuckers didn't want nothing to do with me. Fucking tried to talk to them. Who the fuck are you? So I said, you know what? Fuck you. I'll fucking start my own shit.
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So he built his training facility in his backyard, taking full advantage of the landscape to build this death defying obstacle course. This was enduro before there was enduro. When he and his brother and cousins started showing up at races, self trained and ready for anything, they got an instant reputation.
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F
Every fucking bike shop knows us. Every fucking good rider in Flagstaff knows us. A lot of these people in the industry know us. Diazzi brothers, Resneck riders. Fucking infamous, kind of.
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E
Is that your own title? The Resnecks?
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F
Yes.
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E
That's excellent. Since Jared had always done it his way, made it up as he went along, not unlike Vincent and Nigel, I wondered if an organized team made any real sense out here. Was that the way to get kids into it?
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F
I want to see more kids, but they're too lazy. They're trying to act white. That's the way I look at it. Our communities are put in together. They want to fucking look good. They don't want to go out and herd sheep. They don't want to be out in the sun. You know, to be really home is to be out here. Remember your language. I tell these guys, my siblings and My sisters tell me that. Remember your fucking language, man. Speak it. Don't be shy of it. I do. I do do that. I go to town and I speak it. We're not gonna be Naples here in near future. It's just gonna be a color of skin. That's. That's it, you know? And then they're gonna take this fucking. What we have left the reservation, say, oh, you guys. You guys are not a nation anymore. You two. You're not together. You're broken. They're gonna take it back. Then it's all gone.
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As Jared held court, swearing like a resneck, Nigel and his parents stood there grinning. And I realized this wasn't the world they wanted to shelter Nigel from. Jared was complimenting them on their choices and how they had raised their son.
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There's no water and there's nothing. You go to her sheep, you're walking in sand.
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Still, they hadn't come for the small talk. They'd all come to ride. And pretty soon, everyone set off to check out the Yazzie's famous setup. First stop was a series of massive red rock outcroppings, boulders that sort of mushroomed out of the ground. It looked like a piece of the planet that had just been created. And one of the first rock faces we came to was marked with a series of ancient white petroglyphs.
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D
We'll meet you up there, Nigel.
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Oh, yeah.
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D
No, those are ancient thousands years old. Do a no hander.
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Watching them ride these rocks really brought home what Jared Yazzie had been saying, connecting bicycling to the landscape here and to his heritage. It wasn't some Anglo import the way I had assumed they had made Enduro, riding their own, like speaking their own language.
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Let it roll. Feather your brakes.
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Just roll in.
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It isn't my language. And it wasn't the Rwandans or Scott's language either. They followed Nigel on their bikes, but they always stopped well short of the rock edges when he took off over them. None of them could do what Nigel was doing.
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F
Yeah, I'm good. I went too high to the right.
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Even Jared Yassi wiped out. At one point as he tried to keep up with the kid. He gashed open his arm. As Jared stood there bleeding and grinning and urging Nigel on, I had just one last question for him. He and his resneck riders and Vincent and the riders I'd met in Rwanda, like Nathan and Rafiki, were all scarred, each in their own way, by deep childhood traumas. They'd turn to the bike as a way to ride away from their pasts. But Nigel seemed like a happy kid from a nurturing family. A boy surrounded by love, really. And I wondered, did Jared think Nigel could really be the best if he wasn't driven by some kind of pain or demons like the rest of them? What Jared said was, I've got enough for three generations.
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F
I got enough for three generations. Let that die with me there. Nice job, dude. It's a kid, dude.
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D
Damn.
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F
Oh, yeah. 14. Yeah.
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B
That was Jared Yazzie of the Yazzie Brothers speaking to us from the Navajo Nation. We also heard from Nigel James and Vincent Salabe. They spoke with the New Yorker's Philip Gurevich, and you can find all of Philip's writing over the years@newyorker.com and be sure to take a look at newyorker.com to see photography and videos of the Enduro cyclists in the Navajo Nation. It's really something to see. And that's it for the New Yorker Radio Hour today. I hope you enjoyed the show. Until next week, follow us on Twitter New yorkerradio.
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A
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Bottin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, Michael Lee Rao, Stephen Valentino and Richard Yeh, with help from Jamie York, Michelle Moses, Emily Mann and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supposed to Supported in part by the Turina Endowment Fund.