photo by Matt RoseGrowing up, she always wanted to be like her big brother Jared, now a 22-year-old professional dirt bike racer. Mary, who’s 18, started racing at age six, ripping around the dirt track at the WNC Ag Center on a kid-sized Yamaha PW50. Her father Tommy Tuten, who owns an auction house in Asheville’s River Arts District, said she didn’t have to follow in her big brother’s footsteps if she didn’t want to. But Mary, an Asheville native, thinks riding is fun and it calms her down—most of the time. “It’s my thing to do,” she says. “When I’m on a bike or on the track, I feel like I belong there.”

She does jumps on her bike but few fancy tricks, and she has only flipped over the front handlebars once. (By contrast, her brother Jared has broken several bones.) Most winters, Mary races her Kawasaki 140 bike, which has a top speed of about 50 miles per hour, in the women’s class at the Ag Center. This winter she placed 4th, but she’s relatively nonchalant about her racing record. More exciting are the trips she takes with her dad and brother, way out in the mountains to areas like Burnsville or Pensacola. A Tuten family friend owns hundreds of acres with fishing ponds in Burnsville, and a trail there runs past a rock slide where you can look out across the mountains for miles. Tommy Tuten calls it “redneck heaven.”

Mary, a petite brunette who loves the band AC/DC and is taking A-B Tech classes to learn how to be a police officer, says few of her female friends share her love of dirt bikes and racing. Even fewer understand her interest in law enforcement, and almost everyone underestimates her abilities, given her size. “Some people look at me and say, she’s too small to be a cop or she’s too small to be riding dirt bikes,” she says. “I’m a small person, but I like to prove people wrong.”  —J.M.