Everyday Is Better Than The Next

I’m just going to start typing everything I know about Clint Cade and we will see what happens.

I met Clint sometime around 15 years ago. He lived up the road from me about a mile as I was growing up. We rode the same bus to school as long as I could remember. At some point him and my brother became friends. He would come down to our house with my brother and I kind of got to like the kid. He was three years younger than me, but that didn’t really seem to matter. We had a thing for the winter time, specifically sledding and Clint’s house sat on the most perfect sledding hill.

We would go sledding from sun up to sun down all weekend, and most of the time throughout the week. We would set up little ramps, come up with different ways to go sledding, and various other things to do with sledding. What I always remember about the sledding adventures was that Clint never feared a sledding stunt. I remember one time when we went to the golf course to go sledding Clint rode the “boogey board” down the biggest hill there over a car hood ramp. There were some older kids there and they were daring other kids to go off it (on a sled). Nobody ever dared Clint, they didn’t have to. I looked over at Clint and he was stepping onto the board and starting down the hill. As soon as he went off the ramp the boogey board completely shattered and his feet went over his head. He landed hard on his back and possibly his head. He started making the sound that someone makes when they have been hit in the back and can’t breathe. I ran down the hill just as he was getting up and saying “I’m Ok, it’s cool”. When we eventually got bored with sledding we would just walk around the woods looking for hills to sled down. This usually involved making your way down the hill by going around trees, maybe over a creek, or on some ice. Clint quickly became the master of the boogey board. By the way a boogey board was something that looked like a snowboard except it had nothing to hold your feet, you just had to stand on it like a skateboard. It also had a string at the front to hold on to. The thing was damn near impossible to ride, and Clint was one of the few who could do it.

When the spring and summer came around we continued to go walking around in the woods. Looking back I can’t even remember what we did back there, but everyday seemed to be some kind of crazy new adventure.

I remember one time we took off east until we found this giant tree in the middle of a clearing in the woods. We called it the elephant tree and climbed around it until it was dark. We carved our name in the tree and then went back several years later, but we never did find the tree again. (Side note: When this snow melts, I’m going to go find that tree)

Another time, we followed a creek for what seemed like 20 miles. I think the entire trip took us 6 hours. I remember telling him that we might be in Logansport. Come to find out we were only about 4 miles from his house, Logansport is about 30 miles from his house. Along that trip we stopped along the way to make little sculptures out of the clay that was along the bank of the creek. I made a sculpture of a person, because I wasn’t very artistic and that’s really all I could do. Clint made an entire family of deer. We put them on a rock in the sun so they would dry and harden. We thought how funny it would be if someone found them and wondered if cavemen made them or something. After a while of walking along the creek we just decided to say fuck it and starting walking through the creek. I remember there were times when the water was over Clint’s head and he was flipping out because there might be water moccasins in the creek. We laughed about this later in life. At one point in the journey we decided that we would have to eat so we ate corn roots. This was something that Clint had heard or read in some kind of survival book. He was really into outdoor survival and knew all kinds of things like that. One of his favorite movies that I know of was Jeremiah Johnson who was a mountain man. The corn roots were good, but after we ate a bunch of them we felt like shit.

Being out in the woods all the time led to camping. At the time though, we were pretty young and weren’t sure about being out in the middle of the woods alone and in the dark so we tested the water by setting up a tent in his yard. We did this quite a few times, and one of the funniest times I can remember is the time I woke up to Clint screaming. Just as soon as I raised my head to see what was going on something hit the side of the tent, hard. Clint jumped out of the tent just as it collapsed with me trapped inside. Come to find out, his younger brother had woken up and decided to beat the hell out of his with a golf club. So there I am trapped inside the tent while his little brother beat with a golf club.

Eventually we got the nerve up to camp back in the woods. We had spent some time setting up this little area in the woods that we called the fort. We had plans to build some kind of shelter like thing there. We did accomplish the lean-to kind of thing, but it was never the two story house that we had imagined. So now that we had our little area ready for camping it was time to do it. We got the tent all set up, had a fire going, we were cooking hot dogs, had a lantern going. It was a true camping adventure. We decided to go to sleep. We were laying there talking about what we were going to do the next day, which I think was an attempt to find the elephant tree. Just when we were getting to sleep we heard a crash, then another, and another. Clint said “probably a raccoon”. We didn’t move or make a sound for a good five minutes. The crash never came back. After another 5 minutes, I said “You asleep?” Clint answered back immediately with “No”. I recommended that we go sit by the fire and he agreed. After about an hour of that we convinced ourselves that it was probably better if we just walked back to the house (maybe 1/2 a mile) and called it a night.

A few years later we got into riding our bikes back in a part of the woods that we called the government ground. That eventually led to us all getting dirt bikes. We would spend all day riding those things around the woods and at our houses. I’m sure that every neighbor hated us. Clint’s motorcycle wasn’t a dirt bike it was a street bike that he made into a dirt bike. It probably weighed about 3 times as much as he did. It was so much taller than him that he could have both feet on the ground while he was sitting on it, but he loved that thing. He was always talking about going on the pro motocross circuit. I remember one time he road down to our house, but his throttle cable had broke so instead of twisting the throttle he had to reach down in the engine and manually pull on the throttle. He road around probably 3 hours that day like that. He didn’t even care.

I can’t remember exactly at what point this memory happened, but at some time I went squirrel hunting with Clint. I had a 20 gauge single shot, and Clint was carrying a semi-automatic 20 round clip .22 rifle. His dad and uncle Mike walked down one side of the woods and me and Clint walked down the other. We started walking and every now and then we would give the “hold up” signal like we were marines or something and think that we saw a squirrel. Eventually we did see one. Clint took careful aim. Bang. Then bang bang bang bang bang. At this point he’s not even looking through the sights, he is just unloading on the thing. He eventually runs out of bullets, and while he is reloading I take two shots with my gun. Then Clint unloads another clip. The damn squirrel never fell. We laughed our asses off as watched the squirrel run away after we realized that Clint had just unloaded 40 .22 bullets and I got off two 20 gauge sprays. Since we were now out of ammo, we thought it would be best just to go back to the truck. When we got there Clint’s dad and uncle were already there. They said that since Clint and me and scared away every animal within 20 miles there was no point in hunting anymore.

Down the road, I was turning 16, and Clint was 13. I remember at one point somebody had told him that once I got my license Clint would never see me again. I remember how stupid that sounded at the time, but that’s exactly what happened. Once I could drive, sledding and running around the woods was no longer fun. He still hung out with my brother, but I began to see less and less of Clint. I went off to college and saw even less of him. After college I got a job in the town that we both lived in, but we had grown apart and had our own friends. He was doing his thing and I was doing mine. I had heard that he got in some trouble and I remember reading in the paper about how he was going to end up in prison. Clint ended up spending around a year in prison. Around a week after he got out he ended up coming to my parents lake house. I hadn’t seen him in probably 2 maybe even 3 years. We ended up talking about all the stupid shit that we had done when we were younger. This is something that I had pretty much forgot about, but seeing him brought them all back again.

After that he started hanging out my brother quite a bit, and I began to see a lot more of him. He ended up moving in my brother and another guy right down the street from me. I would go down there all the time. There was always somebody there doing something there. My brother and his friends were railroaders and Clint worked as a logger so his work schedule was flexible and depended a lot on the weather. It was nothing to stop by there after work and see them all drunk doing something crazy like shooting a cross-bow in the house. Clint and I would spend hours there playing Tiger Woods 2003. Video games was something we were really good at, but only me and Clint really got into the Tiger Woods. It wasn’t even fun playing with anybody else. We got into betting on it eventually and some of matches we played were epic battles. We would have 20 bucks on the line and the competition was fierce. Nobody ever came out ahead in the long run, sometimes he would win and sometimes I would.

Eventually everyone ended up moving out of that house. Clint got an apartment a few blocks away and my brother moved in with me. Clint was at the house all the time we would play darts and go on crazy adventures like look for a carburetor for a 71 Ford or something. I would go over to his apartment and we would play Tiger Woods. He would tell me some crazy story about this girl he met, his adventures in prison, or something completely random in general. It was kind of a catching up time for us. I got to know Clint again. A couple of months later, my brother and I got in a big fight and ended up moving out. Clint kind of played mediator between us for a while. I think that I acted like I didn’t want to hear about Dan, but I really did. I think Clint new this and would stop by every now and then to tell me what he was up to. Eventually him and Dan moved in together and I didn’t see a lot of him because he had lost his license, and I didn’t go to Dan’s house because we were still not talking.

Eventually, through an unfortunate turn of events, me and Dan made up and I started hanging out over at their house. And once again, me and Clint were hanging out all the time. It was a wild time over there. I lead a pretty simple life, and I like it that way, but I think I always had a passion to live like they did. They didn’t seem to care if the music was to loud or if the house was clean. It was the true bachelor life that I got to live vicariously through them and their stories. I would stop by there almost every day after work, and if Dan wasn’t there I would wait until Clint got there. We spent a lot of time playing gears of war. I think Clint and probably Dan had several sessions where they played the game for 20 some hours. Clint was known for being an adventurous guy. He always had something he wanted to do. One of his final adventures that he got to live out was being a bull rider. I’m sure the video of his first bull ride which he lasted 2 seconds will go down in history.

The last day I saw Clint, I had stopped over after work. He was getting over being sick, and had just been to court and was pretty happy to be on his way to getting everything over with. He had a 5th of Everclear and half of it was gone when I got there. We played some gears of war. He was telling me about this girl he met, what was going on at work, and we were talking about going sledding like the old days since a big blizzard was coming the next day. During this he finished the rest of the bottle and we played another game of gears. I looked over at him and he looked pretty drunk. He leaned over to me, put his hand on my leg for support, and said “I’m done”. Those were the last words he ever said. After that he leaned over on the couch and went to sleep. I knew he was pretty drunk, but this was something that he and a lot of us did all the time - drank to much and passed out. Right before I left I shook him to make sure he was ok, he kind of leaned back and pointed his finger at me. Since I got a response, I said to myself “He’s ok”. That would be the last time I would see Clint.

Overall Clint was a hell of a guy. He would do anything for you. He was somebody who I knew I could count on. He was a true friend. He was outgoing. He would help you do anything. He was a free-spirit. He was smart. He lived his life to the absolute fullest. He was fearless. He was a hard worker. He didn’t care what anyone thought. Some things will never be the same without you. You will be missed.