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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The Upper Peninsula's Superior State of Mind

—By Tim Murphy

| Sat Sep. 4, 2010 11:35 AM PDT

Yoop We Can: Potatoes + Rutabaga + Beef + Butter + Butter +Butter + Butter = a Pasty. This little fella's from Wakefield, Michigan (Photo: Tim Murphy).Emporia, Kansas—The most out-of-place coffee shop in the United States, so far as I know, is in Cairo, Illinois. I'm a little less certain about the greasy-spoon equivalent, but so far I'd cast my vote for The U.P.Er's Diner in Emporia, a short walk from the red sandstone home of William Allen White*, and approximately 900 miles southwest of its target audience.

Since we left Michigan's Upper Peninsula (or "U.P."), more or less everyone we've met who's so much as heard of the U.P. has had a story about the place, or at least a shared reaction: "Oh man, you went all the way up there?"; or "That place is insane!"; or "Da U.P, eh!" Even in Duluth, which shares the same iron ore heritage and Superior lakefront, the U.P was spoken of in excited tones, as if it were some sort of bizarro sub-culture totally disconnected from the rest of the Northland. Which it kind of is.

The U.P.Er, founded by a transplant from Iron Mountain, is an odd fit for Emporia. There's not an especially large community of Yooper ex-pats in the Flint Hills,** and I can imagine a sizable number of pedestrians have no idea what the giant, green, vaguely sea-monster-shaped landmass on the sign outside is even supposed to be. In its own way, though, it's the quintesential Yooper creation, because it carries with it this outsized sense of place, as if the peninsula and its cuisine were something that all Kansans should just be instinctively familiar with: Thai, Tex-Mex, Tapas, Yooper. You know, Yooper. From da U.P.! The whole place is a shrine to Yooper culture, with maps and old black-and-white photos and pictures of fish covering the walls; I wouldn't go so far as to say Yoopers should have their own state, but the state of mind is undeniable.

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The View From My Windshield: Made For You and Me

—By Tim Murphy

| Thu Sep. 2, 2010 8:56 AM PDT

Rambling: Woody Guthrie monument, Okemah, Oklahoma (Photo: Tim Murphy). Brick by Brick: Woody Guthrie monument, Okemah, Oklahoma (Photo: Tim Murphy).

A Sense of Where We Are: Oklahoma!

—By Tim Murphy

| Wed Sep. 1, 2010 6:51 AM PDT

View Westward Expansion in a larger map

Culinary Interlude: The Case For Pork-Barrel Spending

—By Tim Murphy

| Tue Aug. 31, 2010 5:15 PM PDT

Why They Hate Us: Pork ribs from Arthur Bryant's in Kansas City, Missouri (Photo: Tim Murphy). Gratuitous: Ribs from Arthur Bryant's in Kansas City, Missouri (Photo: Tim Murphy).

Is Mt. Rushmore Too Close to Hallowed Ground?

—By Tim Murphy

| Tue Aug. 31, 2010 3:00 AM PDT

Omaha, Nebraska—By now, I've had a little bit of time to chew over the Wounded Knee massacre monument, and it's still kind of gnawing at me. So I'll just give you a short sketch, to give you a better sense of what the place is like:

Try to imagine a national cemetery, immaculate and regimented, and then visualize the exact opposite of it, and you'll maybe get a decent mental image. When you approach the monument, grasshoppers the color of honey dijon scatter at your feet as if tossed from a see-saw, and the wind cuts through the prairie from the south like entrance music. Cook Islanders had 32 words for wind; I can't speak for the Oglala, but here on the northern plains, in the poorest patch of the richest nation on the face of the Earth, amid acres of wavy wheatgrass and milkwort and sunflowers, and badlands like so many miles of drip-castles in a desert, the wind is the life that rushes through the land when all else has gone to rest.

The cemetery—which includes the monument to the victims of the Wounded Knee massacred by US troops in 1890, along with the graves of Oglala spanning a century—sits on an elevated plot of ground with views of the valley below, provided you're standing outside the chain-link fence that surrounds the central area.

The physical monument itself, which is only a small part of the Wounded Knee cemetery, is more like a collection basket. Well-wishers have left pennies, nickels, dimes, bundles of dried prairie grasses, small rocks, suggested reading materials, feathers, incense, bottles of Dasani, a Bhutan prayer flag, and one very lonely butterscotch sucker. To complete this scene, add a few brigades of ants, because people keep on leaving food, and nothing must go to waste.