The capitol building in Montpelier is small, with a modest gold painted dome. You could throw a rock over it. This is the size of democracy. Your legislator can’t hide from you here. The Pentagon is the size of something else. Not democracy. God Bless America, and the passing of vastness.

It’s balmy, dictionary quality balmy on this lovely Vermont afternoon. We’ve just finished playing for the permanent residents of the Rutland State Penitentiary, and are on our way north to Carter and Chani’s house. A green highway, blue hazy mountains behind. We pass an old wood frame highway hamburger house, and Shawn pulls off the road decisively.

We order Maple Creamees from the young girl at the window. They’re as good as we’d hoped for, and we’d had high hopes. Smooth indeed, a sweet mixed race swirling softee tower of cold delight on a cake cone. Vermont is on our tongues, in our lungs, and a green feast for California summer eyes. We are satisfied. We sit at the edge of a slope overlooking maple trees and a wide grassy meadow. We, creamees, trees.

The Hawks have performed a civic duty and one of the Corporal Acts of Mercy. We have visited the imprisoned, and we have played Humboldt, Branded Man (by Haggard), Long Black Veil, and Drinker’s Hall of Fame, Beautiful Narcotc Place I Reside, Hard Times, and many more, with our acoustic instruments in a small prison rec room. The inmates enjoyed it, and so did we. Our first time at Rutland 2 years ago was a less relaxed time for us. Being ushered through many heavy duty steel doors and bars into a concertina wired prison yard, even one as small and bucolic as Rutland, is intimidating. The prisoners, of all ages, weight classes, tattoo choices, and ethnicities, prowl or hang in the yard, watching us pass. “Hey, Willie Nelson! What’s up?” calls one to cowboy hated grey hippie Paul L, and we all laugh. We’re back, and feeling at home our second time through.We’re back on the green road, passing covered bridges and tiny hamlets perched on the river valley bank back from the highway.

An American flag flies in a vast corn field down below us. The best looking flag we’ve ever seen. This is the American we know and love so well. It’s the 9th of July. Jimi Hendrix stretches out on the iPod. We are a rich nation.

We don’t remember how we got this gig. Sometimes things show up for the Hawks, with no memory of their source. This is one. But we’re here, in a turn of the last century sprawling wood frame road house, a bordello that flourished as a speakeasy in the 1920’s and declined gently into the 1960’s. More recently our host Daniel, a rover from Hollywood by way of San Francisco and New York City, bought the place and restored it to its present funky glory.

Towering trees surround meadows, which ring zen shaped flourishing gardens, which surround the house, which contains dining rooms, kitchen, and elegantly stocked small bar, all on undulating old wood floors. A music room filled with cushions, percussion instruments, and guitars, looks out onto a lawn sloping up to our wood guest house, the Hawks bunk for the night.A gourmet dinner in one of several dining rooms, with wine and port, with Serena, an old friend whose family runs the Maine International Film Festival, a gathering whose sardonic title reveals its very modest beginnings in a small Maine village. Now it’s a big deal, with a 30 page glossy booklet and rumors of Scorcese.

The sun goes down, and we gather in the music room, no mics, and play an acoustic set for Dreamaway lodgers, a most appreciative crowd. We swap t-shirts for bar tab with the wily Daniel, and a good time is had by all. PL tries to sleep outdoors in the hammock, but is eaten alive by mosquitos, and retreats to the main house. The band cabin has a wood-fired sauna and naked lodgers wander in and out though the night. But we don’t mind, hang with out friends around lantern light, drink whiskey in crystal glasses from the bar.

The woods are magical, coated in ferns, covered by lush deciduous canopies of maple, birch, and elm. We’ve left the city behind.

The Berkshires of Western Massachusetts are indeed dreamlike, and not on account of that frosting. We have fled the urban massif, barely escaping its gravitational field, and have flung ourselves into an elliptical orbit that has landed us in a place somewhere between heaven and earth. A snaking narrow highway leads upward into forest and meadow and towns of the Industrial Revolution, with small dark red brick buildings with water wheels on fast moving rivers. We climb, past a last lake, and through a portal into New England past, gracious and remote, shimmering grass and butterflies, up a gravel road to the Dreamaway Lodge, our concert and aboding destination.

The sun’s going down and we’re cruising a section of the Bronx that feels almost rural, with neglected fields filling with weeds and tall trees casting long shade, but the streets are so alive, turn a corner and there are young Latinas hanging out in shop fronts, many young New York dudes doing whatever modern dudes are doing, we’re from California and we’re out of touch. New York is heavy with the continuum of something happening, like a higher voltage Paris or Rome. It’s still happening.

We abort an attempt to get to our hotel in Elizabeth, NJ. It’s a Friday and everyone’s trying to get out of town. The 95 Cross Bronx is jammed. We turn around, a series of urban passageways, magic, through warehouses and tall projects, and we’re on the BQE, then we’re off on Atlantic Boulevard, spectacular view of downtown Manhattan and the docks, the ghosts of the Twin Towers looming as they will forever. We pull up at Hank’s Saloon, another fearless New York attempt to replicate a Texas culture more foreign than Kurdistan, but it’s so fearless that it works. This place is funky, tiny stage, long bar, big window through which the band and Brooklyn can stare at each other.

Tony Gilkyson and Rob Douglas help us dump our non stage gear in the ancient cellar below the street, we set up, and soon enough we’re playing. A good rocking set by the Hawks, seconded by Tony and band. The Plowboys from South Carolina set up, but we’re out of there, Shawn and Paul M to Elizabeth, NJ, Rob and Paul L whisked away by patron saints Charles and Gina to their new and elegant high rise digs in the South Bronx. Charles has just learned to drive, and he handles the late night cruise along the Harlem River like Seinfeld—very relaxed.Next day the Hawks rendezvous at Joe’s Pub in the Village, in the big and old New York Public Theater building complex, which has been divided into a series of stages and performance halls. We wander the halls through the old, venerable reading rooms. We feel the history of New York theater rising up out of the floor. Literature makes it’s stand against music once again in a competition of the arts. Which is better, more powerful, stronger? How many artists have faced these questions and looked for the grand compromise between the two? Leonard Cohen comes to mind first, if only because “Suzanne” is playing through the iPod. Then, of course, there’s Roger Daltry, Robert Plant, and the rest. The Public Theater tries to bridge the gap, and succeeds. Joe’s Pub is a great room, modernized with black sound baffling, a great sound system, comfy couches and low tables. The Hawks and Tony race through a quick and pro afternoon soundcheck, then scatter across the Village.

Washington Square hosts acrobats, comedians, and impersonators these days though the occasional folkie still struggles to be heard among the hyped-up electrified modern performers. ISHILA is glad to report that a strong cappuccino is still easy to find in the Village. Some artifacts still remain from the lost Beatnik revolution. Returning to Joe’s Pub that night, we catch the tail end off what seems like a parody of foundation grant performance art: a tap dancing female poet backed up by a fusion bass player, French percussionist, and oud player. Poet recites poetry, tap dances, bares her soul. The audience is rapt. The Hawks are redneck simpletons baffled by this cultural mashup. Is it terrible, or simply pretentious? It’s certainly well executed. Later we find out it’s no joke at all, these articulate hucksters are the beneficiaries of a generous grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. Can someone who knows this game please get us some money?

NYC is like L.A.: you have to play here again and again and again, and you still might not have a following. Which we don’t. Enough friends and country rock fans fill Joe’s Pub to make an audience quorum, and the Hawks do a solid set. Tony’s set is fiery, lighting the dark recesses of the room.

The lid to the mason jar was loose. Somewhere between DC and Hartford, CT, the moonshine has slowly leaked out and soaked The Economist magazine. An ironic juxtaposition of cultural artifacts. Farewell, whisky, we love ye well.

Don’t ask us how we know, but we know the most carefully guarded secret since George Bush met with Osama Bin Laden to plot 9/11: the ending to the Harry Potter series. Promise you won’t tell anyone, because we could get in a lot of trouble for this. Anyway:

As expected, Harry fights a climactic battle with Voldemort, a spectacular duel that plunges the pair into secret caves at the bottom of the Hogwarts lake, sends them soaring into the stratosphere where all is blue violet and twinkling stars, and summons legions of demons and good spirits from ancient millennia, in a pitched battle for the soul of Earth.Deep in a dark and phantom woods, Harry and Voldemort are thrust into solitary confrontation by unseen forces. Face to face, inches apart in the swirling mists, both strike with equal force, speed, and timing. Their wands, sparking and hissing, lock in a moment of frozen eternity, an eternity so cold that snow falls and birds drop from the sky. Day turns to night, glaciers rise like ghostly steam, crushing the forest, and Harry and Voldemort, locked in kindred hatred, shatter into a million sharp and glittering fragments . . .

Sleep, long and dreamless. Then grogginess, thick and heavy. Slowly Harry wakes to his surroundings: total darkness. The air is close and damp. Harry struggles wildly, lashing out and sending unseen boxes and bags toppling, then calms himself. He reaches out. A doorknob, somehow familiar.Harry opens the door. Light, afternoon, a hallway. Of course. He’s back with the Dursleys. Harry’s heart sinks. He lusts, improbably, for the adrenaline of mortal combat, for his lovely and terrible world of magic. He walks into the kitchen. The Dursleys greet him, coldly, as Harry might expect, but with solemnity. “Harry, we need to talk.”

The Dursleys tell Harry that they’re boarding up his closet. He’s too old for these infantile flights of fancy. They’ve confiscated his wand, and they’re enrolling him in a weight loss program in Swindon.Harry looks down at himself. He’s fat.

“After all, Harry—you are our only son.”Harry remembers. His potent fantasy, his escape from dreary suburban English life and its numbing school system, evaporates.

That night Harry realized that he was a warrior. He was not destined for this world. And if he was banished from the closet under the stairs, he was going to escape by any means necessary.At midnight, Harry smothered himself with his own tear-soaked pillow in the silence of his bedroom.

Or at least he tried. His parents found him gasping for air, and pulled him from his downy pillow’s death-grip. Harry returned to school that September, where he passed his exams. He lost 35 pounds and was rewarded with a ferry ride to Southend On Sea, where he consumed bags of french fries with mayonnaise and several butter tarts.

Dear readers: The Hawks wish to start a hobby farm and restaurant somewhere in L.A. We’re looking for a one acre lot for high density organic gardening and an oversized Victorian house to convert into a restaurant/café/performance space. Perhaps the Adams or South Central area? We’ll grow the food and prepare gourmet meals, including artisanal goat cheese from the goats grazing on the front lawn. We’ll sponsor a farmer’s market (guaranteed organic produce only) and have acoustic music afternoon weekends and evenings, and host special eco events.

The South Central farmers got the shaft, but their vision must live on. Every fallow open space in Los Angeles should be fair game for food growing. The City of Los Angeles can sponsor a program to set up irrigation and fencing on empty lots all across this vast housing sprawl.