Raleigh, North Carolina
It’s Monday June 19th and the Hawks have scattered. Shawn and the Pauls are steaming toward Washington, D.C. to catch a 7 PM plane back to L.A. RW and family are headed back down the I-40 to Memphis and a night in the Waller Compound. We had our last show in Raleigh last night. Like many shows on this tour there was a small but enthusiastic crowd. Our dear friend Mona brought her father and several other members of her family for a Father’s Day night with the Hawks. Pour House booker and all around sweetheart Marianne cooked a ham for these hungry and travel weary souls. The show got a good preview from Philip Van Vleck, a wise and forward thinking writer from the Durham Herald Sun. Check out the full article here. As usual, North Carolina was warm and welcoming.
The Pour House sits on the old town square just down the street from the capitol. The square was dedicated in 1740, and has a large copper sculpture of an acorn at its center, a modern addition. The capitol itself is genteel in scale. Constructed in 1840 of granite slabs carried over the rolling North Carolina hills on an experimental railroad, the building is crowned with a small green dome. There’s a simple grace to the building which lacks the ornamental imperial arrogance of many other state capitals. This building comes from the era of limited government, before it became involved in legislating seat belts and cigarette smoking. From the era when government proceeded on a tight mandate from the people. Will we ever again see such an era? Report from Paul: The drive from Raleigh to DC on the interstate is devoid of romance and southern charm. The Interstate system was designed to prevent, or perhaps facilitate, an armed takeover of the continental United States, but it also serves to funnel those of us racing faster than nature intended us to down time-defying corridors. It leaves the rest of the country picturesque and relatively unstandardized, although creeping Interstateism, like kudzu, may eventually have its way with all of this great land.
The Cracker Barrel restaurant chain is a southern institution. Here the rain falls, plants grow like weeds, green assaults the eye from every angle. So why the canned vegetables?
Paul L dropped Paul M and Shawn at Dulles International Airport. watched them disappear into the glass 1970’s modern terminal, and drove down a long highway past endless brand new tract-home-and-the-corporate-malls-that-serve-them intrusions into green earth, to Lee’s Ferry, a brick and wood frame little town dating from the 1740’s that is miraculously untrammeled by pastel makeover.Paul’s brother Gabe and his wife Deanna and their too cute baby girl Carlin spent a leisurely day visiting the Potomac River, where, upstream from the Pentagon, it is wild, full of rapids that swell prodigiously in winter. 
The Powtomack Canal, instigated by George Washington himself, remains in ruins paralleling the river, its tiny width just enough for small cargo boats hand poled around the fierce rapids of the river. Beautiful woods still prevail in the cradle of American democracy. 
A last DC to L.A. flight, and now all the Hawks are home. Peace in the Valley.