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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A Good Idea at the Time: Drive-Through Daiquiris

—By Tim Murphy

| Mon Aug. 9, 2010 7:09 PM PDT

Natchitoches, Louisiana—Ok, this is a terrible photo. But you know what else is terrible? The concept of drive-through daiquiri joints.

Our guide in Natchitoches (pronounced "Nachos," I think*) told us the two most Natchitoches things we could do—other than go on a B&B-crawl—would be to go to a Chevron and buy meat pies, and then wash them down with drive-through daiquiris. What could go wrong?

I kind of admire the sheer audacity of the drive-through bar. And to be sure, there's a certain novelty and convenience factor: You just roll on in, place your order for small, medium, large, or "family size" (not a typo), and wait for your change; it's really the only reminder in Natchitoches that you're still in the same state as Bourbon Street. But the drive-through daiquiri place also feels a lot like cigarette ads circa 1960, when they'd have the little animated magical pony (or whatever) imploring kids to buy Marlboros. I ordered something called "Skittles";—"Purple Pill" is also quite popular. Both sound like their target audience is only just getting into chapter books.

All of that's kind of a sidecar to the primary flaw, which is that you're served a delicious, cold, slushy, alcoholic beverage in a styrofoam cup, with a straw, in your car. And so, invariably, are your friends, too. You're also probably really thirsty, because the average August high in Natchitoches is 153-degrees, and, like I said, you have this giant, delicious, cold, (occasionally family-sized) slushy beverage that tastes like liquified spiked sour patch kids, just sitting there, a foot-and-a-half from the steering wheel and melting fast. None of us broke any laws, rest assured. But they certainly make things easy.

On the other hand, if you drive an hour west of Natchitoches with your Purple Pill, you'll be in the great state of Texas, where, as MoJo reported in March, cops can arrest you for drinking while you're still in a bar. So it could be worse.

*Actually, Natchitoches is pronounced "Nack-a-dish." Just like it looks. As for its sister city, Nacogdoches, Texas, I have no clue.

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The View From My Windshield: Last Line of Defense

—By Tim Murphy

| Mon Aug. 9, 2010 4:14 PM PDT

Simmesport, Louisiana—As if New Orleans didn't have enough to worry about in the area of environmental catastrophes, here's another one: The Mississippi River wants out. If it weren't for the Army Corps of Engineers' Old River control system, which carefully manages the flow of water from the Mississippi down into the Atchafalaya River, the Big Muddy would take a right just north of Simmesport and flow into the Gulf of Mexico at Morgan City, bypassing the Big Easy altogether. As John McPhee put it, "The Sixth World War would do less damage to southern Louisiana."

The Cost of Doing Business in Grand Isle

—By Tim Murphy

| Sun Aug. 8, 2010 9:59 AM PDT

Grand Isle, Louisiana—One of the three occupied campsites at Grand Isle State Park is taken up by an environmental activist in a bio-diesel bus; the other two are active in the oil industry. I get the now-familiar "we're not allowed to talk to you" from one couple involved in the cleanup. But Timmy Magnon, who's there with his wife and kids, is more open. He works in the industry (not for BP) and is camping here on a business trip; it's cheap, conveniently situated (there's a seaplane base down the street), and available on short notice.

"It was bound to happen sooner or later. All we keep saying is it's better it happened to an oil giant like BP than a smaller company that didn't have the funds to contain the spill," he says. "It's a cost of business."

Closer to the beach, a few steps past the red-and-white signs warning pedestrians to stay clear, I meet Wendy Ray and her family, visiting from New Orleans. She’s snapping photos of her kids in front of a backdrop of booms, Coast Guard vessels, mounds of sand, and orange barriers.

"Am I supposed to smile?," asks her daughter.

Wendy used to visit the park as a young biology student; she hadn't returned in 35 years, until today. "It was more natural then," she says. No kidding. The beach today, in addition to the sights mentioned above, also carries with it a thick aroma of petroleum, which Wendy says reminds her of fried fish.

Over the last few weeks, there's been a bit of a kerfuffle over reports, greatly exaggerated, that the Gulf's floating oil has disappeared. I won't really comment on that—read Mac McClelland instead—except to say that after actually seeing the town, the search for oil really misses the point. Driving down Bayou Lafourche, I passed dozens of tied-up fishing trawlers idling away the cleanup, boarded-up seafood shacks, and rows of homemade signs lambasting BP. You need to see oil in Grand Isle as much as you need to see the shark in the first hour-and-a-half of Jaws; the fallout should be enough. Anyways, there's little I can say about Grand Isle that Mac hasn't already written. So check her stuff out here, and read the rest of MoJo's full team coverage here.

Update: This just went up today, but you should really just stop what you're doing and read Julia Whitty's piece on what BP's scientists aren't telling us about the spill. It's probably the definitive (at this point in time) explanation of just what we're missing when pretend the oil isn't there. Seriously, check it out.

A Sense of Where We Are: On the Mississippi

—By Tim Murphy

| Sat Aug. 7, 2010 3:30 PM PDT

View Westward Expansion in a larger map

I've been meaning to note this for a while, so I'll just use the space under this map to point out that there's actually a Zell Miller Mountain Parkway in northwest Georgia, which we drove across for 15-20 minutes a few weeks back. Zell Miller! I wish I could think of something smart and cutting to say, but it's actually just like any other highway. Except it challenged us to a duel.

New Orleans' Garden of Good Intentions

—By Tim Murphy

| Sat Aug. 7, 2010 10:15 AM PDT

Pittsburgh: What's Platinum LEED certified, flood resistant, and looks like an elephant? One of Brad Pitt's new houses in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward (Photo: Tim Murphy).New Orleans, Louisiana—I touched on this briefly in my last post, but one of the stranger (if not totally unexpected) things about post-Katrina New Orleans is the extent to which the city's worst-hit areas have become a primordial stew for all manner of idealists. It's a bit like the early American frontier in a way, where religious entrepreneurs and land-happy dreamers plotted out their own utopian communities and would-be empires on the uncharted Eden.

Partly this is due to the fact that there are no Daniel Burnham, Chicago-after-the-fire, big plans to be found. If the federal or city government is actively trying to lure displaced residents back, they deserve credit for at last stifling a leak. Once you get off the main drags of St. Claude or Claiborne (or Brad Pitt's construction zone toward the canal), the streets feel like they've been paved with fun-size volcanoes, pocked with craters big enough to have their own potholes. You don't pass through intersections so much as you overcome them. Absent the land's original tenants, much of the real estate has returned to nature. Stop signs (the ones still manning their posts) are often blocked from site entirely, as are a few intersections, to the point where you have to roll down your window and listen for oncoming cars, rather than look both ways.

Overgrown: (Photo: Tim Murphy) Overgrown: (Photo: Tim Murphy)Telephone wires are down, irreparable buildings (including a few churches) are lost in the overgrowth, and from the street you can find dozens of boarded-up buildings that still wear the spray-paint scars of the first-responders—noting the date the house was searched, the group that did it, and the number of dead found inside.

So that's the bad news. The good news, depending on how you look at it, is that the relative vacuum of activity has made it a hub for the aforementioned pioneers. Walk around for a bit and you'll find a Mennonite aid organization, various church groups from as far off as Atlanta, community gardens, and, invariably, tourists (architectural and otherwise) who've come here to see Brad Pitt.