It’s hard to imagine, but my buddy Clem turned 70 today.
In part, that’s hard for me to imagine because, honestly, when I get together with Tom “Clem” Clemens, I think of him as the same sandy haired, slightly taller kid from up the hill by the Dairy Queen in Chamberlain I started hanging out with when I was about 12.
We played ball together, and hunted together, and fished together, and drove bicycles and motorcycles and cars a little too fast together, and sometimes went to court together. We went to SDSU together, too, including a semester where we “roomed” together with our good Chamberlain buddy Larry Marsh in a low-rent (you can take that in a couple of ways) trailer house where whitecaps began to form in bathtub water during strong winds.
Clem and I never got far from each other after college, either. I was best man at his first wedding, and he was best man at mine. We decided that the fact that neither of those marriages endured shouldn’t be held against either of us “best men." Of course, we didn’t consult our ex-wives on that.
Still, we decided not to tempt fate the second time around. So, neither of us was best man at our second marriages. So far, so very good in both!
While Larry headed off for a wildlife-agency career in Alaska — we still see him once or twice a year and make getting together a priority — Clem and I stayed in South Dakota. And we have seen each other frequently each year over the last 40 years or so.
In fact, the 350 or so miles from Sioux Falls where Clem lives to Rapid City where I live make up the biggest chunk of real estate separating us in our entire lives. And we still look for ways to get together, as we did recently when we met in central South Dakota to do some fishing at Reliance Dam, Big Bend Dam and American Creek.
Actually, I fished. Clem watched. And we both talked and remembered a few things. We ended the day up along Highway 50 in the Missouri River breaks north of Chamberlain, sharing a simple supper at socially distant opposite ends of a picnic table at the Roam Free Park — as the sun went down beyond the river we’ve known and loved our entire lives.
And driving away that day, I concluded once again that our friendship is one of those priceless things you can depend on in life. It’s always the same when we get together: comfortable, familiar, casual, mutually affirming.
And now the buddy I share all that with is 70? That’s just strange.
Stranger still is the fact that I’ll be there myself soon, God willing. I’m 68 and then some, after all, about 16 months short of celebrating my seventh decade here on the planet.
I’m struggling with that a little in advance. Seventy seems like, well, a lot of years, especially for a “kid” who still feels like he’s 16 when a rooster pheasant flushes or that light “tap” on the tip of a graphite spinning rod bends into the electric weight of a fish.
Seventy? No, seriously? As in 10 years shy of 80? How did that happen?
Well, pretty gradually, but at what seems now like an accelerating pace. What is it “they” say? The days drag and the years fly?
Some days drag. Some fly. But the years? Yeah, they seem to pick up the pace as they accumulate, unlike the people who tag along.
Clem looks pretty good for a guy his age. Really good, in fact. I’ll leave it to others to determine how good I look. I think I was fortunate to look older than my years at a younger age, so I didn’t have so much to lose.
Besides, a beat-up face like mine tends to grow on you. If mugs were highways, mine would not be a scenic byway. It would be a rutted gravel road that still takes you where you want to go. And I’m OK with that.
I’m OK for my age, too. Really OK, in fact, most days. I’m lucky, compared to some others closing in on 70, to be able to do the things I do as regularly and as energetically as I do them. Outdoor things, mostly.
Just yesterday, I took my wife of 18 years — a bit of an adolescent for the purposes of this discussion, since she is still three months shy of 62 — up Spearfish Canyon for a full day of fly fishing.
And I mean full, as in mid-morning until near sundown, with stops in lower Spearfish Creek, middle Spearfish creek, upper Spearfish Creek, East Spearfish Creek (I call it Hanna Creek), Hanna Pond and the pond just up Long Draw Road that I call, well, Long Draw Pond.
Gosh we had fun, thrashing around in the pushy stream flow, with beauty all around us. We caught some fish, too: wild brown trout; wild brook trout; and one wild rainbow trout. The wild rainbow was especially fun, because a stretch of Spearfish Creek is the only place in the Black Hills — which means in South Dakota — with self-sustaining rainbow trout.
And I can tell you, I celebrate such fish and such days more completely and with more awareness and gratitude than I ever did when I was younger. I plan on getting Clem in a stream out here before long. Because with all the things we’ve shared over the growing expanse of our years as pals, we’ve never waded a stream and caught trout together.
I don’t particularly care for that whole “bucket-list” thing. And I’m sure not making any lists. But I suppose if I did, that would be on it.
You think about those things at this age. Just like you think about the people you have known and lost. Like others in our age group, Clem and I exchange news of the latest deaths or the latest illnesses among those we knew growing up and have come to know since.
We also trade personal PSA and blood pressure and cholesterol scores, as we once might have traded big-league baseball cards. We’re both doing OK there, too, in some cases with a little help from legal drugs.
So, all told, we’re upright, ambulatory, and about as coherent as we ever were.
For a 70-year-old, and for a friend who’s not far from it, that’s a birthday present of the best kind.
And this one’s for you, Clem.
