Tim Murphy

Reporter

Tim Murphy is a reporter in MoJo's DC bureau. Last summer he logged 22,000 miles while blogging about his cross-country road trip for Mother Jones. His writing has been featured in Slate and the Washington Monthly. Email him with tips and insights at tmurphy [at] motherjones [dot] com.

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Is the Yellowstone Supervolcano an Illuminati Plot?

—By Tim Murphy

| Fri Sep. 24, 2010 10:05 AM PDT

Someone Walked: The National Park Service doesn't mess around when it comes to terrifying signage. Meanwhile, why does the one adult in this scene seem totally unfazed by the screams of these poor children? (Photo: Tim Murphy).Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming—Back on the planet Earth where I was raised, I'd never given much credence to the notion that the Yellowstone Supervolcano was part of a New World Order plot to exterminate two-thirds of the world's population, bring about the Messiah, and restore large swaths of the continent to their original wilderness state. Then I discovered the Internet:

"The Illuminati may be planning to use the destructive nature of the Yellowstone Super Volcano as their major tool to accomplish their coveted 'Re-wilding' project."

I guess Lady Gaga was just a decoy. Fortunately, there's a whole community of independent Internet researchers who have committed themselves to constant vigilance of all things supervolcano—they monitor seismographic charts, earthquake patterns in the shape of a "Y" (Yellowstone has a calling card, apparently) in the western part of the continent, and the National Park Service's Old Faithful webcam (which you can, and absolutely should, do as well). Rest assured that, should things start to get hairy, you'll be able to plan accordingly and move somewhere remote like Montan—oh. Oh.

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A Sense of Where We Are: Wyoming

—By Tim Murphy

| Thu Sep. 23, 2010 7:26 PM PDT

View Westward Expansion in a larger map

The View From My Windshield: The Great Debate

—By Tim Murphy

| Thu Sep. 23, 2010 12:59 PM PDT

The Town That Didn't Fail: Searchlight, Nevada—Harry Reid's hometown (Photo: Tim Murphy). The Town That Didn't Fail: Searchlight, Nevada is the hometown of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. It's also debating—passionately—a plan to install wind turbines just outside of town. My personal favorite suggestion: "please camoflage with blue!!!" Get on it, guys (Photo: Tim Murphy).

The Salton Sea: Not for Everyone

—By Tim Murphy

| Tue Sep. 21, 2010 3:00 AM PDT

Another Palm Springs: The Salton Sea is not for everyone (Photo: Tim Murphy).Bombay Beach, California—At the far corner of the Ski Inn on Avenue A, in the only juice joint in a town too small, even, for its own polling station, two-hundred and thirty-nine feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean—an elevation that's low enough for long enough that Navy pilots will from time to time buzz overhead just to tell their buddies they took a dip below sea level—George Cannon, 90, is talking about his fears.

"I'm glad I'm not a young person right now," he says, emphatically, looking up from a glass of Franzia. He'll say this many times over the course of a few hours. The reasons are myriad—there's the recession, no, depression, which he frets will take us years to get out of. There's China, which is just sitting there waiting to become the second wheel to a world war. And there's the Mayan apocalypse, which is slated to arrive sometime in 2012, by which point he will gladly be gone* and we'll be stuck dealing with whatever the heck it is that's even supposed to happen. Not that he isn't content with his life—"If I could go back, I'd like things to happen as they did; the good times outnumbered the bad." Just glad he's not my age is all.

George has a piece of shrapnel, picked up in Burma during the War, on the inside of his right bicep, visible to the eye as a brown dot. He went in for an MRI once ("those M things"), and was kept in the chamber for, by his estimate, 300 hours, because the doctor forgot to take that into account. It also sets off metal detectors, although he can usually escape detention. His darts game has hit a rough patch recently, but all told, he has taken his years well; the desert has a way of making everyone, 8 to 80, look 65.

The View From My Windshield: The Last Free Place

—By Tim Murphy

| Mon Sep. 20, 2010 11:47 AM PDT

Lead There be Light: Leonard Knight, 79, began building Salvation Mountain at the entrance to Slab City in 1986 (Photo: Tim Murphy). Lead There be Light: Leonard Knight, 79, began building Salvation Mountain, outside Niland, California, in 1986. I'd hesitate to call anything made from gallons of paint "green" except in a strictly colorful sense, but Knight does get creative, constructing "trees" out of stacked tires, adobe, and large sticks. Mostly, though, the place is about getting the message out: God = Love. In recent years, Knight's legend has grown with appearances in Sean Penn's "Into the Wild," and the John Waters-narrated documentary, "Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea" (Photo: Tim Murphy).