When the Christmas season rolls around, most children create an overwhelming wish list with all the latest toys and gadgets, circling all their desires in the store catalogs.
For Ethan Hernandez, a 16-year-old from Winlock, one dream gift always topped his list: a dirt bike.
Since he was about 5 years old, he wanted nothing more than a dirt bike like the ones he saw in movies. His favorite movie as a child was “Motocross Kids,” a 2004 film that helped Hernandez fall asleep when he was young, sending him into dreams of racing around the track on a dirt bike.
But when Hernandez finally got a dirt bike in 2023, he never could have imagined that it would ignite a passion in him that would save him from an unfathomable darkness.
Hernandez was diagnosed with high-risk leukemia in June 2023 when he was 14 years old toward the end of his eighth-grade year. For about a month, his mother Jessica Van Riper was convinced he had infectious mononucleosis, known more widely as mono. She noticed her son was “washed out,” didn’t have color in his face, struggled with energy and focus, and slept frequently. Previously, Hernandez was an avid athlete, so the change was alarming for Van Riper.
“I took him in to get a mono test, expecting completely that that’s what it was going to be. (The doctor) sent us over to get labs done,” Van Riper said. “His pediatrician that he’s had his whole life called at like 9 p.m. that night after we got home and said, ‘I need you to put him in the car and pack an overnight bag and get to Randall Children’s Hospital in Portland immediately.’”
The doctor told the family that Hernandez’s blood cell counts were “highly suspicious" and that it was “highly possible” that he had some type of blood cancer. Van Riper said Hernandez had six red blood cells in his body and that he “virtually had no red blood in his body because (leukemia) had just taken over.”
Hernandez was immediately taken to the emergency room at the children’s hospital in Portland over an hour away from home and was hooked up to an IV before he was transferred to the intensive care unit (ICU) for a transfusion. He spent over a week in the ICU, and Van Riper was unable to leave while her husband at the time was on a work trip in Virginia. Hernandez underwent surgery to get a port placed, which came with complications.
After his stint in the ICU, Hernandez was relocated to a Ronald McDonald House in Portland across the street from the hospital while he had hospital appointments about every other day. As he wasn’t able to leave and go anywhere with crowds of people, Hernandez stayed inside and spent much of his time cooking and scrolling through Facebook Marketplace advertisements for dirt bikes for sale.
Once Hernandez came home from the Ronald McDonald House, he wasn’t able to start high school in Winlock because of his chemotherapy, which he said made him feel more sick than the cancer itself. He tried online school, but he couldn’t focus because he was still “grossly sick,” his mother said.
“Other than death, I’m not sure there’s a more breaking experience ever for anyone that has a child,” Van Riper said of watching Hernandez go through chemotherapy.
Around this same time, Hernandez’s stepfather left home and took his stepsister, which Van Riper said was “all the family he had ever known.” Hernandez was in the lowest state of mind amid the chemotherapy and having his family ripped apart.
Van Riper knew she needed to find a way to give her son something to look forward to, something to put a smile on his face. She found a dirt bike for a decent price close to her parents’ home, where she and Hernandez were staying.
“He didn’t have a lot to look forward to at that moment, and he was super sick. We’d been in and out of the emergency room. I don’t even know how many different times he had an infection,” Van Riper said.
One day, Van Riper woke Hernandez from his sleep with a new blue and white Yamaha YZ85. While he was not physically capable of riding the bike at the time of receiving the gift, it gave him something to look forward to. He slowly built back muscle in his body and was able to ride for short periods of time, spending a little time each day at least getting up and sitting on the dirt bike.
He started riding around Van Riper’s parents’ property, which was mostly flat without any turns or curves. But even though it wasn’t the racetrack he always dreamed of zooming around, it still lifted Hernandez’s spirits.
“It was everything that I wanted to do,” he said. “It’s definitely something to get away from just sitting around. It’s like an escape.”
In early 2025, he was able to ride around on a racetrack in Toutle for the first time, and he competed in his first official race on May 8 at the Thursday Night Motocross event at the Portland International Raceway. Hernandez races every Thursday and sometimes on Saturdays. Van Riper said racing on the dirt bike is an outlet for Hernandez to clear his mind and have fun.
“I think Ethan is the kind of kid that needs a goal. He has to have something to drive toward. In anything he’s ever done, he gives 110%. The kid is constantly trying to learn how to do things better or what he could do that would make him faster or make him more competitive,” she said. “Seeing him, he’s just electric out there. It lights him up.”
Hernandez is in the second phase of maintenance for leukemia, making a trip to the hospital once a month to get his blood cell counts checked. Every three months, he gets a lumbar puncture and five days worth of steroids. His end date is Sept. 20, when he will have one final procedure and will ring the bell at Randall Children’s Hospital in Portland.
Hernandez’s next goal is turning pro in dirt bike racing and continuing to use his experiences over the last two years as motivation on the track. He often tells his mom, “I’m just built different.”
“Knowing what I’ve gone through, it feels like I’ve accomplished so much,” he said. “I feel like I just need to keep going because of what I’ve gone through. It makes me need to work harder.”
Napoleon Hill, a self-help author who wrote the 1937 book “Think and Grow Rich,” once said “Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.” Van Riper believes this quote fits Hernandez and his drive to a tee.
“That’s how I’ve always tried to live my life, and that’s how I’ve raised my son. All he’s done through every obstacle he’s encountered and throughout all of this crap is given 100%, even when he doesn’t feel good,” she said.
