11

Mary

AFTER ADRIAN AND I WERE DIVORCED, Jeff Griffith and I were good friends again. When I wasn’t off doing clinics, we teamed up to ride a lot of colts, hunt gophers, and fish during the day. At night we spent a lot of time running around, going to bars, and chasing girls.

I didn’t date anybody seriously, but I sure dated a lot. I suppose I was so afraid of having my life destroyed again by a bad relationship that I didn’t go out with any woman for very long. I kept everything pretty casual. Even though what happened between Adrian and me wasn’t my fault, I felt so much guilt and shame about having been divorced that I decided I was going to stay single.

I wasn’t really living anywhere in particular at this time. I was on the road doing a lot of clinics, and when I was back in Montana, I more or less lived up Indian Creek at Jorie Butler’s place. When I didn’t have a clinic to do, I’d ride her thoroughbreds and hang out with Jeff.

There have been times in my life when my choices in women have been fairly superficial. It was unique in my experience to meet a woman who is as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside. Luckily I met one (given my track record, it had to have been luck). Her name is Mary.

I was doing a clinic in Boulder, Colorado, in 1986 when Mary Bower and I first met. She was one of the students, and she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

Mary had been a fashion model, and at the height of her career she signed with the Ford Agency in New York. Even though she was assured of a lucrative career, she didn’t like the idea of living in New York City, and after a couple of weeks she left. She moved to Los Angeles, where she appeared in a lot of print ads and commercials. She had some bit parts in television shows, but after a while she moved back to Colorado.

At the time we met, Mary was married to a former Denver Broncos football player named Rob Swenson. They had two young daughters, Lauren and Kristin. Her marriage was in trouble, but she hadn’t filed for divorce yet. Rob was living in Denver where he was trying to get a real estate business going, and she was in Boulder with the two girls.

I had had a policy of never dating my clinic students, but when I watched Mary lope circles on her colt, I decided if I were ever going to break that rule, I’d have to marry her. I loved her from the moment I first saw her. It may sound like a scene out of a Harlequin romance, but something told me that this was the woman I would spend the rest of my life with.

After Mary had been to a number of my clinics and we’d started getting to know each other better, I sent her a note. I told her how much I thought of her and how much our friendship meant to me. I also told Mary that I didn’t want to take her money for the clinic because I knew how hard it was to come by. I found out years later that she had been mowing lawns to come to my clinics.

Buck and Mary.

Mary called me the night she received the note and thanked me. She told me that the note made her cry. Her marriage had been an unhappy one, she had two young girls, and she didn’t know what to do.

I told her, “Mary, I want to be with you more than anyone else in the whole world.”

We started spending hours together, talking and getting to know each other. Mary knew quite a bit about me even before we’d met because I had a public life. She’d heard about Adrian and some of the things I’d fought through, but as we got to know each other better and began to trust each other, I shared with her things about myself that I normally don’t share with anybody. Because I spend a lot of time talking into a microphone, people assume that it’s not easy to hurt my feelings. It is. I’m just as sensitive as the next person, but it’s hard for people to see that in my line of work.

I didn’t say anything about Mary to my friends in Montana yet, but I did tell my foster mom about her. I told Betsy how much it meant to me to know this person, and I asked her to pray for me that one day we would be together because Mary was the person I always wanted to be with.

The turning point in our relationship came when I put on a clinic at the Pass Creek Ranch outside Parkman, Wyoming.

The students and I were all staying at a little guest house on the ranch. One night I ran out of chewing tobacco (I still had that unsavory habit), and I was headed for the Parkman Bar on the border of the Crow Indian Reservation to buy some. Mary, who was there with her sister Mindy, said she wanted to ride along with me.

As soon as we got into the truck, Mary asked in her direct way, “So, Buck, what are we going to do about this?”

I blurted out, “You could spend the rest of your life with me, and then it wouldn’t be a problem. I’ve loved you for a long time, Mary.”

She looked at me for a moment, then she smiled and said, “Me, too.”

It was all that needed to be said. I don’t know if the Parkman Bar was five miles away or five hundred. The moment was forever.

After we got back to the ranch, we walked out to check on the horses. Until that point, we had never even held hands. But there in the Wyoming moonlight, with the world spinning around us, we held each other and kissed.

The divorce wasn’t particularly friendly when it came, but it wasn’t as bad as some. Even though I think Rob respected me, it was hard on him, and it was an adjustment for Kristin and Lauren. They were five and seven at the time, and at first they were confused that their mother wanted to be with me instead of their dad. She had always been a wonderful mother, and the girls knew she loved them, but it wasn’t easy for them, either.

Mary came out to Montana once or twice a month and stayed with me at Indian Creek in the Madison Valley. We spent most of the rest of the time on the phone. Our phone bills were close to the national debt.

I proposed while we were sitting on a bridge over Indian Creek in Ennis, Montana, where I was doing a clinic. Mary was again direct. She asked, “What do you intend to do about this?” She meant our relationship.

I replied, “I intend to spend the rest of my life with you.”

That is how it happened, on a summer evening on the Madison River, under a moonlit sky … the whole nine yards.

Mary introduced me to her girls over the July Fourth holiday in Jackson Hole. We rode the gondola up to the top of the Tetons—Kristin called it the gondelo. I felt strange at first, because I didn’t know anything about children. All I knew was about being single, but we had a lot of fun.

I had met her parents, Bill and Lorraine Bower, in Boulder a few months after we started going out. Bill had been a fairly well-known aviator during World War II. He was one of Jimmy Doolittle’s raiders flying B-25s, and he was part of the raid on Tokyo that was America’s response to Pearl Harbor. We got along just fine.

Her close friends were all for us, and so were her brothers Bill and Jimmy. Mindy was excited that we were going to be brother and sister-in-law, but some of Mary’s other friends probably thought she’d lost her mind. She was a beautiful model who had been around some fairly influential people. She knew just about everybody in Boulder, and here she was running off with a cowboy. I’m sure they were shocked, but Mary and I were so consumed with love for each other that, quite honestly, neither one of us gave a damn what anybody thought. If they couldn’t accept what we had decided to do with our lives, then they weren’t really our friends after all.

Buck, center, with some of the women in his life. From left: Mary’s sister Mindy Bower—a superb horsewoman—Mary’s daughter Lauren, Mary holding daughter Reata, and Mary’s daughter Kristin.

Mary and I were married July 6, 1992, in an outdoor ceremony at my foster parents’ ranch. Mary’s girls, her folks, and my foster mother, Betsy, were there, along with most of our closest friends. They had seen us go through some hard times, and they were thrilled for us. They seemed to feel we were getting the happy ending that we’d both been waiting for.

Kristin and Lauren were flower girls. Instead of having a specific best man and maid or matron of honor, we wanted all our friends and loved ones to play that part. Preacher Dave conducted the ceremony. As it turned out, we were the last couple he married. Not long after our wedding, he quit being a preacher and moved down to Oklahoma where he started selling mobile homes.

We lived around Bozeman for the first couple of years after we were married. We bought a house on five acres outside of town and kept several horses. I was busy doing clinics, and at first Mary found having me on the road as much as I was somewhat difficult. She’s learned to handle it pretty well since, but maybe that’s because a little bit of me goes a long way.

I began learning how to be a stepdad. Kids have a forgiveness for their real parents that they don’t have for stepparents. That means there are two different playbooks, two different sets of rules. Kids are almost looking for you to become the wicked stepfather or stepmother. That validates situations so that kids will have a scapegoat, which gives them a license to misbehave.

My primary object was to become friends with Lauren and Kristin. That’s how I learned that you pick your battles more carefully, and there are times you have to let go. Things have worked out well at our house: the girls are straight-A students and model citizens.

That goes back to what I’ve said: whether you’re dealing with a kid or an adult or a horse, treat them the way you’d like them to be, not the way they are now.

I taught the girls to ride, and Mary and I rode with them some, but they never really got into horses. Their real passion has always been schoolwork, which is a full-time job. I’m really proud of them, and I love them as I do my own daughter, Reata.

Mary got pregnant in the summer of 1993, the year we acquired the Houlihan Ranch in December. We had looked at some other places, but Mary liked the country around Sheridan, Wyoming. We heard that the ranch was available when I was doing a clinic in North Carolina. The property was a thousand acres of grassland and rolling hills, and when I got a descriptive package from the Realtor handling the sale, it looked like a good deal. Worried that the ranch would be sold by the time I got back, I made an offer sight unseen. Buying property that way can be risky, but it turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made.

The house was old, but we remodeled it according to our tastes. I built corrals and a lot of new fencing myself, and the work I did on The Horse Whisperer helped pay for an indoor arena so that I’ve got a place to ride in the winter. That makes a real difference when the snow is coming in sideways at seventy miles an hour.

Our newborn daughter was named Reata, which in Spanish means a rawhide rope “of great strength”; Mary and I loved the sound of the word. Reata was born on March 30, 1994. I was in Malibu, California, doing a clinic. I had arranged to take time off so I could be present when the baby came, but Mary delivered a week early, and I just couldn’t get home fast enough. I’ll be sorry for the rest of my life that I wasn’t there to see her birth.

It’s generally accepted that if you’re in the pattern of being abused by one or both parents, that’s what you’re going to do when you grow up. I don’t agree. I believe the deciding factor all boils down to free will. People have the choice. Self-discipline prevents that streak from coming out. You need to be vigilant to guard against a slow growth in the wrong direction. You need to be cognizant of how you behave toward your wife and children. Not a day goes by when you don’t think about how you want to be and how you don’t want to be. It’s always in the back of your mind, a burden that you carry.

Mary runs the ranch when I’m on the road doing clinics. We keep approximately forty horses and, depending on the summer grass, we run anywhere from one hundred to six or seven hundred steers. We ship in the fall, and Mary can do it all. She’s a good hand and resourceful, too. She takes care of the horses; she moves the cattle when it’s time to change pastures; and when there’s a tractor job that needs doing, she jumps on and does it. When I’m at home, we work together; but when I’m on the road, she’s on her own. It’s like the old saying goes: “You never want to have a bigger ranch than what your wife can run.”

It’s hard being on the road so much of the time. I miss my family a lot when I’m gone, and it seems unfair that I have to be away from them as often as I am. Mary and I remain absolutely committed to each other, but I have a calling. I have a mission, and I have to fulfill it.