Hawks

Sure, we could afford the one way rent a car (although rental represents half our guarantee in Louisville). But we want to shatter the alienation that’s keeping hitchhikers off America’s onramps. On our entire 6 week, 10,500 mile tour we’ve seen exactly one hitcher. To a veteran of the glory days, when Santa Barbara would be clogged with 500 long haired adventurers thumbing to San Francisco and Seattle, seeking or offering weed and love, this vanishing is on the scale of the buffalo or passenger pigeon.

Let’s bring back the free ride, America. Let’s spread the love. Help out a brother, a sister, a country rock band. Let’s make this country great again.

We’ve just crossed the raging wide Yellowstone River, which flows north under the bridge into Billings. To the right is a massive Conoco refinery with cracking towers and huge tanks, smells just like Long Beach. A cluster of radio towers on the high river bluffs where Indians watched the approaching feds. Does anyone mourn Custer? This town is sprawling, under construction and decay. Every Product Your Horse Needs. Montana Women’s prison. Poker and Keno in a nearby bar. Anti-meth graffiti scrawled on abandoned shacks.

We reach respectable downtown Billings, new five story buildings, with new pedestrian bridges at its showcase intersection. We’re seeking Stella’s, a café featured in Road Food, a thick guide to off the beaten path American eateries, present from the saintly Charles and Gina in NYC. We’ve managed to hit three of these places so far, a minor miracle. Stella’s is a large and anonymous modern restaurant, with nothing very distinctive except a giant pancake that overflows the banks of its plate. You could make one at home. Stella’s receives a Hawks Adequacy Award. As does Billings.

When we get back to the Yukon, we realize we’ve taken out quite a few bugs on this tour through (so far) 28 states. That’s a lot of karma, in thousands of tiny doses. Perhaps a car wash will unburden us of this cosmic debt.

At the onramp gas station lot in depressed Miles City, Montana, fading town with home made anti-meth posters in store windows, on the high plains between Badlands and Billings–sits a tiny Espresso Hut; and Rob W., our morning driver, comes to life, makes a hard turn into the lot. Four fire fighters in shorts, one of them female, are fueling up, pouring half a jar of sugar into their coffees. They’ve just come off a big fire to the south and are heading north for another blaze.

A very nice lady pours double cappuccinos, chatting cheerily as the espresso drizzles from the machine. She’s not stopping the flow, now clear as a mountain stream. Still our barista chats, as we urban degenerates watch in silent horror. Finally she shuts the machine off. And now for the soy milk. Not bad, nice foam, doh! She stops pouring the steamed milk into the cup before too much of that icky foam can spill in. Here you go!North Dakota is depressed. Collapsed 19th century houses and rotting barns stand on many farms, and little towns are half boarded up. This is what happens when farm culture is thrust, blinking and bewildered, into the global economy. When the tables turn, we’ll take canning and composting lessons from our barista.

We pull off for a piss stop in near darkness. Paul L runs blindly down the straight dirt road towards a fading blue patch that persists in the dark sky. A brief Indian chant, shout out to the people we wish we could be, or be part of. Back in the Yukon.

Billings or Miles City? It’s ten p.m., we’ve powered 700 miles in a day, and DJ Shawn is keeping us artificially pumped with his pied piper iPod mix. Three hours to Billings, less than an hour to Miles City. Shawn dials up Joni Mitchell. Our pulses slow.Miles City it is. Eight motels a stone’s throw from the I-94: Best Western, Motel 6, Comfort Inn, and all the rest. All booked up. The Best Western clerk points his steel claw northward. “I’ve booked you two rooms at the Olive Motel. Left on Main, under the bridge about a mile.” Do they have wi-fi? “You’d better take these rooms. They’re holding them for you.” This burly man with the artificial hand is intimidating. He’s implying that if we don’t take the Olive Motel rooms we’ll be sleeping in the Yukon.

Next to us is a young father who is quietly losing his mind. Hook hand doesn’t see any reservation for Best Western on his computer, even though young father made them through OnStar hours ago. Apparently the Onstar radio ads aren’t sharing the dark side of this modern miracle. Hook picks up the phone again, makes reservations for young father and family at the Olive. Young father races out the door, into his Explorer. He wants to get to the Olive before we do, in case there’s another screwup. He guns the motor. Our Yukon is blocking him in. He backs up towards us. Okay, okay. We back up. He backs up, but doesn’t have room to cut right and out of the lot. He cuts left. We make our move, cutting right behind young father, who indeed tries to back up to block our exit, but he’s not quick enough. We’re on the road to the Olive Motel, young father hot on our tail until a slow moving Falcon cuts in front of him. We drive slowly to display that this is not a race, this is the land of plenty. Although it is strange that all rooms are booked in the middle of the Dakota plains on a Wednesday night.

We arrive at the Olive, a stately and decrepit hotel with wood columns and swastika patterned intricate tile floor, built in the 1880s when Miles City was a boom town, centered around a federal fort and Indian outpost. The whole town moved when the Yellowstone River shifted course. The Olive Hotel is too funky for young father. He and family flee in their Explorer. Lord save them. We ask about Internet access. The gray-haired night clerk with the injured ear looks down, closes his eyes, and shakes his head despairingly.

Our upstairs rooms smell, and there appears to be some kind of young hooker action going on down the long The Shining type hallways. One of the beds isn’t made up, so downstairs the clerk hands us sheets. But damn it, the TV has better choices than any Hampton or Comfort Inn we’ve stayed in so far, endless channels. The beds are comfy. One of the showers works. A late night Maker’s Mark party, watching an old Pee Wee Herman episode. And so to bed.

What does a country rock band talk about on a thousand mile trek across North Dakota and Montana?

Well, Cherry Garcia, for example. Shawn is fantasizing about eating a Maple Creamee, but this is not going to happen as we enter the Badlands. But a Cherry Garcia ice cream bar by Ben and Jerry’s (also a Vermont phenomenon) is at least an outside possibility. Cherry Garcia is at the pinnacle of corporate standardization parameters. It’s almost too good. Rich red cherry ice cream with real cherry chunks dipped generously, langourously in dark chocolate, cooling to an irregular and beguiling shape, like the red wax on a bottle of Maker’s Mark. —–

We’re powering west through sad and lovely North Dakota on I-94, with rainshadows on the beckoning end of day horizon, and round hay bales, corn, and dirt road villages to the sides of the road. Gray billowing clouds above.

We’re listening to NPR, and Robert Siegal, our plucky and ever-present patrician voice of reason, is interviewing a woman with an electronic scanner in a supermarket. The woman works for a statistics firm and is recording the price of apples, oranges, and grain to track inflation. Are you lulled into a mellow stupor yet? R. Siegal follows the statistician around for what seems like a half hour as she reads the price of apples. Hmm, 3 pounds for a dollar ninety nine. And how about Valencia oranges? $1.22 a pound, offers Robert, a little too eagerly, his grade school role as the kissass nerd racing to the fore.This goes on and on and on. NPR has truly trivialized itself (and Us the listener) into an ostrich’s hole, where we can muse on the minutiae as the distant thunder arrives.

North Dakota presents miles of open, uncluttered beauty to interstate drivers. Picture the rolling hills of California, 50 years ago, somewhat flattened out by a giant Hand O’ God, and that’s what we’re seeing on this long, long drive. We’re chasing the sun, and sunset and twilight last hours and hours.

Why Minneapolis? Why Saint Paul? Well, the Mississippi River, that’s why. On the east bank is St. Paul, on the west the larger Minneapolis, with a more impressive skyline, a graceful and casual flow of new skyscrapers and great looking older stone buildings. On our way to the gig at the western edge of the city, we pass a very eccentric old brewery, with castle type turrets and haphazard brick warehouse add-ons. The city has preserved this industrial age oddity as a library.

We drive through a comfortably fading old neighborhood to Mayslacks, the neighborhood bar, another classic on our tour. Big and dark, and we lug the gear in through a side patio and set up. Paul Metsa, local legend who’s played at Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid, does a solo set, with some burning acoustic guitar and an epic ballad of Jack Ruby, with JFK conspiracy lyrics that warm Paul L’s paranoid heart. The Hawks hit the stage with a strong set, egged on by Rob’s many friends and relatives who fill the bar. Then a giant of a man, Sherwin Linton, takes the stage in 70’s wraparound deluxe sunglasses and tall black hat, leads his Hawks backup band through Johnny Cash classics. He’s having a great time and so are we, and Sherwin stretches his two song appearance into seven or eight tunes. A big man with a big voice.

Next morning Dennis Pelowski, Rob’s fellow Rochester Minnesotan and our attorney who steered us through our record deal, takes us to a local legend: Al’s Breakfast, in Dinkytown, the university section of Minnesota where Bob Dylan got his start. Al’s Breakfast, est. 1930’s or 1940’s, is a long and narrow room packed to its edges with a long bar and stools looking across to an oven and stoves, where beautiful young women cook and serve. We’re all in it together, customers and cooks, in a dingy smoke stained low ceiling cocoon. The food is delicious. Delicious. Three of us get the Jose, which is two poached eggs atop hash browns smothered in hot sauce and cheese. Delicious. Blueberry pancakes. Delicious. Paul M. and Shawn order Spike, which is scrambled eggs with mushrooms, onions, garlic, cheese and tomatoes. Outstanding. There is no better breakfast in America. Not since the late and lamented Gutter in Highland Park.

It’s drizzling rain as we say goodbye to Dennis and head east on the 94. A thousand miles to Big Sky. Here we go.

We hit the big shoulders of Chicago at dusk, and el trains, each emblazoned with an iPod ad, greet and escort us to within gawking distance of the skyline. Which we never get any closer to. Our bare bones EconoLodge is on Mannheim Boulevard in a hard times neighborhood to the west. Dump the stuff, head for Fitzgerald’s in Berwyn, also west of downtown.

Fitzgerald’s is housed in a big old house, and booker Andy greets us, and Bill Fitzgerald himself is there, a big time music supporter who puts on a great festival, in addition to booking the best in roots music at the club. Tony Gilkyson and Rob Douglas, fresh off an almost missed plane flight from L.A., greet us. Sound check, pizza, play music. Paddi and Jeff Thomas, who host a Mt. Washington house concert that we play, show up, some Coles fans, and the father of landscape architect Catherine, another Coles family member. Some hometown love far from home. The crowd is modest in size but very enthused, and we do an encore. Bill hangs to the end, a true music lover, and we’ve made a good connection in the heartland. We pack up, venture outside, and are greeted by a thrillingly hellish wallop of oven heat, tropical humidity, thunder and lightning, and 60 mile per hour winds that knock over outdoor tables and awnings. Then the rain dumps, hard, and we wait it out, hanging out with Bill Fitzgerald and his (very good) sound man. The rain slows, we pack, drive soaked streets back to the EconoLodge. The Yukon is damp, and so are we.

Corn country. Much higher than the stalks of Vermont, which has a tiny growing season in its forbidding climes. Corn abounds here in the plains, and so do we.

Paul Marshall has a deep and abiding homing instinct for what’s good in America. And that instinct was on the money this noon day in the Heartland. Paul got the inner voice: exit I-90 at Sandusky, Ohio. A toll booth attendant, who Rob surmised is an artist, perhaps a painter, forced into a day job, recommended we drive south one mile for a good meal. “But it won’t be a chain,” he warned. That was okay with us.A mile south through corn fields and big old Ohio houses brought us to Milan (pronounced “My-lan”), home of Thomas Alva Edison. The record heat wave sun beat down upon us as we walked across a gravel lot to Main Street, Milan, a perfect town square with gazebo and war monument on a rectangular lawn, with old brick and stone mercantile establishments, a barber shop, the Wonder Bar, and our goal: The Invention Café, with a light bulb on the sign in honor of Milan’s most famous citizen.

Inside, Invention Café is 1930’s décor that L.A. eateries strive to recreate from estate sales and eBay auctions. Chrome stools, booths, an American flag cut and painted from corrugated Quonset hut aluminum. Not for sale.Simple, fresh, delicious, American. This was our meal, served up by a bronzed blonde waitress, with great speed and kindness. Trash Hash is hash browns mixed with eggs, peppers, and anything else your heart desires. Omelet, raisin toast, elderberry pie. Couldn’t be done better. Reality based food thrives in the heartland. Only a mile off the interstate.

An hour down the road, we pulled into a large truck stop rest stop off the I-90 in Indiana, our 17th state of the tour. We all got out, lured by shiny objects and air conditioning inside the glass palaces surrounding the gas station. We all came back to the Yukon, and discovered that no one had actually pumped the gas we’d paid for. Such is the lure of the McDonald’s travel center, where Paul L purchased a 25 cent Indiana Lotto ticket from a vending machine. This is a brilliant marketing scheme. Who’s not going to fish a quarter out of his pocket for a chance to win $50? Which Paul didn’t.