Women who ride pay tribute to 'Motorcycle Mary'

EVERYTHING HAPPENS FAST in the desert. Day becomes night, night becomes day, still air kicks up a sandstorm in seconds. On a recent Saturday on a private plot of land in Johnson Valley, California, a cinnamon sunset disappears into darkness as a day-old supermoon rises from behind a craggy mountain range.

Beneath it, a film projector hums to life, shooting a beam of light that fills the side of a white box truck with a six-by-nine screen, and illuminates this corner of the Mojave Desert to reveal hundreds of women, many clad in riding gear, sitting on dirt bikes at this makeshift theater. Others sit cross-legged in the sand, cuddled together for warmth. Temperatures drop fast in the desert.

The movie starts. An old woman's face fills the screen.

She's seated in a garage, a workbench and a modern-day enduro motorcycle blurred in the background. She's wearing a purple turtleneck, frameless glasses and a touch of blush. Her hair is wispy and white, her face rutted deeply by time.

"By the way," the woman says, lifting her eyes to the camera. "I brought my Hall of Fame ring." She holds it up and pushes it into focus. It's gold and engraved with a rider on a retro motorcycle. "There's an inscription," she says. Her voice is high and steady as she stares mischievously into the lens. "It says, 'Drinks gas. Spits nails.'" She smiles. The crowd roars.

That smile belongs to Mary McGee, the first woman in America to race motorcycles and the first woman to hold an International Motorcycling Federation license, which she received in 1960 at age 24. She is the first woman to finish the grueling Baja 1000, which she did driving a Datsun pickup, and remarkably, the first person, man or woman, to solo the Baja 500 on a motorcycle. She did that in 1975, at 38, but received little recognition at the time. Instead, throughout her career, the racing community was largely unwilling to acknowledge her groundbreaking achievements.

"I didn't pay any attention to it," McGee says in the film. "I was having too much fun."

Nearly 50 years later, McGee is the subject of a 22-minute documentary, "Motorcycle Mary," from ESPN's 30 for 30, and the reason we're gathered here tonight, women who can draw a direct line from McGee's life to our own. But I'm not here on assignment.

I'm here because this ESPN screening is taking place at Babes in the Dirt, an annual three-day dirt bike campout for women and the most nonnegotiable weekend on my calendar. The women I've met through the off-road motorcycle community have become some of the most important in my life, which each year revolves more and more around finding the time to explore new terrain and test my limits alongside them.

As I watch McGee's story unfold from the back of the crowd, through the shadowed figures of women who ride motorcycles in a world McGee helped to create, I realize McGee didn't just solo the Baja 500. She soloed most of her career. Now, a half century after she crossed that finish line in Ensenada, Mexico, hundreds of women are gathered to watch her story and celebrate her life. While doing so, we begin to understand the role she has played in ours.

ASHMORE ELLIS WAS nearing her 26th birthday when she glanced over her shoulder and saw a woman with long, dark hair riding a vintage Honda on South Coast Highway 101 near her home in Encinitas, California. "I saw myself in her," Ellis says. "It instantly clicked that I could be a motorcyclist, too."

Ellis started searching Craigslist, bought a 1970s blue Yamaha 350 street bike and signed up for a Motorcycle Safety Foundation class as a birthday gift to herself. "At first, it scared me just to sit on it. I was in constant fear of dumping it in a parking lot and not being able to pick it up," she says. "I would go at midnight and ride it around town, practicing parking and backing up and shifting from neutral to first gear on hills. I did that until I wasn't scared anymore."

As she grew more comfortable, Ellis started going on longer rides, eventually during the day, upgraded to a custom Harley-Davidson Sportster and went to a couple of motorcycle shows. At one, she reconnected with Anya Violet, a clothing designer to whom she had sold her Yamaha a year earlier. Violet had grown up riding and racing dirt bikes but was new to street riding, as well, so the two made plans to meet for a girls' weekend of motorcycle camping.

"We thought it would be fun to open it to other girls," Ellis says. She didn't know many women who rode, aside from a handful on social media. In fact, so few women rode motorcycles in her part of San Diego at the time, Ellis eventually met and befriended the woman she had seen on Coast Highway that day. This was her chance to maybe meet a few more.

"We made a crappy flyer on WordPress and gave instructions to meet at this Starbucks off Highway 79 in Borrego Springs," Ellis says of the small city in northeast San Diego County. She and Violet posted the flyer on Instagram and hoped a few women might be game for an adventure. Worst-case scenario: They would camp alone. Best case: Ten women would show up and they would have nine new friends who liked to ride motorcycles and camp in the desert.

The day of the meetup, Ellis rode her Harley to Borrego Springs and parked at the Starbucks. "I heard all these engines start to approach, and as they get closer, I see it's all women," she says. "I can still close my eyes and hear those engines. I just didn't expect it." More than 50 women from as far as New York joined that October 2013 campout, which Ellis and Violet dubbed "Babes in Borrego."

"It's a special person who shows up for something like that," Ellis says. "I knew I wasn't alone. I knew there were more of us out there." The community grew fast in the desert. The next year, more than 500 women attended Babes Ride Out in Joshua Tree, California. Ellis and Violet held their first official Babes in the Dirt off-road campout in 2015.

Nine years later, tears roll down Ellis' cheeks as she watches McGee on the big screen, at a screening she's hosting.

"Nothing could stop her," Ellis says. "The way she speaks about riding, her passion, Mary's one of us. She didn't just talk about it. She did it and she did it her way, without reservation and through adversity, through people telling her no and that she shouldn't be there. That resonates with me."

Ellis thinks about how many women McGee inspired to throw their legs over a motorcycle for the first time, just like a woman on Coast Highway did for her more than a decade ago -- and just like she does for women today.

"I have no special powers. I'm not an athlete," Ellis says. "But I care so deeply, and I know what riding has done for my life. How can I not do that for someone else, tell them, 'I'll be there. I'll be your friend,' especially knowing there are people out there who haven't discovered this yet in themselves."

I FIRST CROSSED paths with McGee in 2013 when I was embedded as a journalist with the four-rider KTM team at the Baja 1000. We became Facebook friends. I remember reading the old newspaper articles she posted and seeing the black-and-white images of her racing in Baja and the Mojave Desert in the 1960s and '70s ... the photo she posted in January 2017, shortly after her 80th birthday, of her holding a handmade poster board sign and standing in snow after walking five miles in the Lake Tahoe Women's March ... her album from December 2018, when she was inducted into the American Motorcycle Association Hall of Fame.

McGee was a living legend, but she never received widespread acclaim. Many of the women here had never heard of her before now. Until recently, Googling the first person to solo -- or "IronMan" -- the Baja 500 returned only the names of men who did it driving off-road vehicles. "There wasn't any notoriety about me doing it," McGee says in the film. "Because I'm a woman."

Then a few years ago, a filmmaker named Haley Watson came across McGee's story online and was moved to tell it. When I learned Ellis and Violet were holding a screening of Watson's film at Babes, I was struck by the kismet. The event was taking place in the Mojave, in an area just off a highway known locally as Old Woman Springs Road, on the same day riders would cross the finish line of the 2024 Baja 1000 in Ensenada, Mexico, 270 miles away.

"Being in the desert watching the film, you didn't just see and hear what she was doing," Ellis says. "You felt it."

A little over halfway through the film, McGee recounts a party in the mid-1960s where her friend, actor and motocross icon Steve McQueen -- "You remember Steve McQueen," she says, and giggles -- urged her away from pavement and toward the rugged, physically demanding world of off-road motorcycle racing. Up to that point, McGee had had a successful career racing cars and street bikes but hadn't considered shifting to dirt.

"Steve said, 'Mary McGee, you have got to get off that pansy road racing bike of yours and come out to the desert,'" she says, and laughs.

We all scream.

We are standing in the place where McQueen summoned McGee to change history -- or at least to move some of it forward more quickly.

For many of us, like McGee, our introduction to the sport was through a man. The first people who loaned me bikes and showed me how to ride them were the professional athletes I wrote about. Of them, my now sister-in-law, Jolene Van Vugt, a Canadian motocross champion and the first woman to backflip a full-sized dirt bike, was the only woman.

Jolene's dad and older brother (my husband) taught her to ride and race motocross. They taught her to weight her outside foot in the corners and keep her elbows up through the whoops. Travis Pastrana taught her to backflip and invited her into his Nitro Circus. The coordinators who hire her in the Hollywood stunt world, where she works today, are mostly men. Like McGee, like all of us, what's important isn't where the opportunities came from; it's that she accepted them and followed them to the finish. Like McGee, Jolene didn't set out to inspire other women. But in the doing, she did.

When McGee recounts saying yes to her first car race -- "After that, my motto was, 'Always say yes,'" -- we all hoot and holler. "Yes, Mary, yes!"

"Stay calm," McGee says. "Twist the throttle."

We yell. (And start mentally designing stickers with that mantra for our bikes.)

"If I'm starting a race," she says of the 1975 Baja 500 in the film's emotional climax, "I'm gonna finish."

We howl and yawp.

"You just do your thing for yourself," McGee says. "Not for other people."

As we all cheer, I realize I'm crying. I've been crying. Jolene, who's sitting next to me, is crying. "I can't stop," she says, laughing through tears.

On this night, in this place, surrounded by these women and at a time when an undercurrent of unease runs through our lives, McGee is an adrenaline drip of hope and joy flowing straight to our hearts. We all owe something to McGee and the women who followed her lead, twisted the throttle and sped ahead.

THE FILM ENDS, and for a moment, the desert returns to darkness. Ellis walks to the front. "Start your bikes," she says as she's bathed in the light of hundreds of headlights.

"We're going to do this for Mary," she says and then walks back to her bike and begins a countdown.

"10 ... 9 ... 8 ..." We all join in, loud as we can. "7 ... 6 ... 5 ..."

"I would blow up my engine for you, Mary!" Ellis shouts.

The revving of hundreds of dirt bike engines -- two- and four-strokes, modern and classic, big and small -- fills the vastness of the desert.

"Thank you, Mary!"

"We love you, Mary!"

"We are you, Mary!"

Women hug and thank their friends, for being here, for introducing them to dirt bikes, for taking them on their first rides and pushing them to be better. Some thank the men who are here for being their McQueen. They thank Ellis and Violet for introducing them to Motorcycle Mary, for making this night possible and for embodying McGee's spirit. They thank them for creating this space, one many of them never could have imagined when they were young, and for sharing it with them.

We wonder what McGee would think of it all.

"My mind went to her at the Baja 500, when everyone was revving on that start line 50 years ago," Ellis says. "That excitement, the nervousness, the focus. I hope that when she hears this, maybe she closes her eyes, and it brings her back to that moment. That starting line was such a pivotal point in her life."

And it changed all of ours.

THIS ISN'T THE ending I'd hoped to write. I'd planned to FaceTime with McGee and witness her reaction when Watson shared with her a video from that night in the desert. I planned to ask her if, when she closed her eyes and heard the sound of hundreds of revving engines, she was transported to that start line in Ensenada the day she accomplished something no woman had done before her.

But I never had the chance. On Wednesday morning, at age 87, Mary McGee died. According to her family, she was surrounded by people who loved her when she left her earthly body peacefully. I'd like to believe that, as in life, she went fast.

Five days before her death, McGee posted to Facebook from her hospital bed. "NO FACELIFT!" she joked alongside a smiling photo of her in a blue hospital bonnet ahead of a scheduled procedure. "I'll be here for a few days, everything is going well, I feel good. I'll be home soon."

When I learned the news of her death, I was heartbroken. I thought she would never know what she meant to us all and we would never know what she thought of her legacy. As I scrolled through her Facebook page, I saw that in the days before her death, many women had posted the revving video from Babes along with heartfelt tributes about how she'd inspired them. I wondered if she ever saw their messages. I couldn't bear to think that she hadn't.

But then I realized something. We know what McGee thought of it all -- because she told us.

At the end of the documentary, McGee contemplates her life and all that came from saying yes, staying calm and twisting the throttle. "I got to do all these wonderful things," she says. "I have all these great stories because of all the wonderful things that happened. And I'm grateful for that."

She lived to see a woman line up for the night show at a Supercross race, Ironwoman the Baja 1000 on a motorcycle and even backflip a dirt bike. She lived to see her legacy play out firsthand.

"But probably the thing I'm proudest about," McGee says, "is that I had something to do with showing women that they can come out and race motorcycles."