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.

Shawn Nourse is a Norseman. He comes from a people who run naked in the summer, the endless days when the sun circles the horizon, winking for a moment before rising again, when a Norseman or Norse lassie loses track of time and self in an orgiastic and pagan burst of activity.

Shawn’s forebears wrapped themselves in animal skins in the equally endless winters, huddled around a peat fire playing mind games with each other in semi-darkness, until one, perhaps addled by ergot or spoiled mead, launches himself upon a brother or cousin and strangles the life out of his tormentor, before collapsing outside the tent in a frenzy of Nordic guilt, wandering into the woods, shunned by the huddled community in the black shadows of tree and cliff, and haunted echo of fjord. This is our drummer. An animal bound by modern morality, Christianity, Americanism, Masonry, stick-to-itiveness, capitalism, decency, weekends, Daylight Savings, algebra, traffic school, the Constitution, no smoking laws, drinking age, diplomas, credit card regulations, internet protocol, tax codes, passport applications, union dues, matrimony, Social Security, unemployment, FICA, NAFTA, ASCAP, Yahoo, cell phone manuals, photoshop, passing lanes, scorecards, report cards, and the white zone.

Beware his moment of berserkery, when the ancient genes override the rules, when highly trained wrists and forearms turn malevolent. Beware the Norseman.

We’re on Interstate 90 west heading west just west of Troy, NY. We’ll be on this road all the way to Chicago. It’s 5 p.m., and we’re trying to make Cleveland tonight. We got a late start this morning, split into two breakfast factions: Rob with familia Waller y Stowell and Mark Follman to an early morning Riverrun restaurant rendezvous, and Shawn and the Pauls to Coffee Corner in downtown Montpelier.

Shawn and Paul have been living a Spartan, boot camp life on the hard floors of the lovely architect Eileen’s empty add-on to her 1850’s wood frame house way out in the woods. Every evening after a show they’ve bid farewell to chez Stowell and driven out to their barracks, driving back in the morning. This morning Paul L took a canoe onto the nearby lake and paddled around a beaver house out in the middle. This is the only beaver loyal PL would ever chase on the road. Idyllic, with surprisingly few bugs, except for a curious dragonfly who landed on the canoe for a staring contest. Eileen made Shawn and Paul coffee with thick, frothy raw milk from a mason jar, purchased for a dollar down the road–perhaps the most Vermontlike moment of our stay; and then they grabbed Paul M for the drive into Montpelier. As a result, SN and PL can claim to have out-Vermonted the rest of the Hawks.

Coffee Corner gets a rapidly upwardly moving thumbs up for a delicious omelette with garlic scapes (that’s the curling tips of the garlic plant, mostly unknown to Californians) and raisin toast. We raced back north up green Vermontery to Carter’s, loaded up with Rob, and hit the road for sweet home Chicago. It’s not easy getting out of Vermont. Very beautiful, very green, but a labyrinth of winding roads and tempting roadside treats. We make four to six stops in search of the elusive Maple Softee, but somehow we never make the right choice. Sadly, we leave the state without satisfying this last jones. Only more reason to return soon.

The sun is going down and we’ve just passed the Ithaca, NY exit. This is psychologically bad, because we were just here two days ago. A whole day shot to hell and we’re not even out of New York.Paul L is filled with self loathing. He’s consumed, so far today: 1 coffee, with raw milk and sugar; an omelette, raisin toast, and home fries; a small chocolate gelato; a veggie wrap and a Red Bull; part of Rob’s inferior coffee; a large raspberry and French coffee ice cream with waffle cone. He wishes he had the courage and freedom from self censorship to make himself throw up in the Sbarro restroom.

Community lives on in the green forested hills of Vermont, even if it is an uneasy mix of multi-generational rural families in shorts and t-shirts, and newcomers from Boston and Austin in their vintage dresses. Where trustafarians meet ATV riding hunters who ride with their infants on their laps. Everyone waves on the back roads, glad to be among the thick trees and clear waters, a destination determined by the reliable movement of some clear internal compass.

God bless Carter and Chani and little Elvin. They’ve put up with the Hawks and living room jamming (actually, Carter instigated most of these) for five days in their 1840’s wood frame house overlooking a green valley and the hamlet of Worcester and its white steeple, and looking up to Hunger Mountain and clouds above.Carter is a percussionist and the Hawks webmaster and caretaker of Hawks Headquarters North. He and Chani are world class outdoors people, and could survive on this land of short summers and long winters if global commerce ended. Carter has introduced the Hawks to the natives, and so here we are, playing a Saturday night barn dance in the Vermont hills. As the sun heads into the trees, families drive up the long dirt road and pull off to the side, hike up the hill to the big barn, built in the 1880s as a cow barn but converted 100 years ago into the regional dance hall, where it was host to dances, gunfights, and trysts in the surrounding woods until 1972, when it shut down for the first time. The wood floor boards were pulled from surround land, and the floor hums like a vibrating string as the dancers move and bounce upon it.

It’s 2006 and the barn is back in action. We’re part of a community revivalism, strangers brought together to replicate traditional bonds: dancing on a wood floor to country music. We’ve got all the ingredients: little ones, oldsters, moms and dads, wheelbarrows full of beer, tables of potluck food, Christmas lights strung from the very high and darkened rafters, a spotlight on the wood stage at the far end where the Hawks play Haggard and Lefty along with their own numbers. Carter has called in favors from his vast Vermont network of musical friends and clients alike to cobble together a solid sound system. Add in the natural reverb of the big old barn and the San Francisco night club sound training of Uncle Folz and it all sounds great. The whole night felt very good. Good to be a dance band in a barn in the fields among the dense woods. Good to watch the children led their parents and grand parents out onto the dance floor. Good to drink the beer, smell the air, and watch the fireflies in the humid summer country night. Perhaps this is our Hawks mission: music for a return to communalism, localism. If the experiment fails, at least we can sing a sweet sad requiem, a waltz at evening’s end.