Cruisin' along

Bible Belt gets by with old cars, ingenuity

COFFEE POT, Miss. (RWN) - If you sat for awhile on Main Street in this southern Mississippi town, it'd be like sitting in a time machine. Passing on by would be the Fords, the GMCs, the Hondas of the old days. They're beaten up and chipped and some of the headlights don't fit right, but they're running, and that's how life is in the Bible Belt.

Unable to export very much, the Bible Belt has a major trade imbalance and doesn't get very good terms from the Chinese car companies that provide the majority of affordable vehicles in the world.

Further complicating things is the Bible Belt's relative lack of affluence, which makes car makers hesitant about entering the market.

Thus, the time machine.

"It's not the best car in the world, but it turns over every day," Mabel Briggs says about her 2004 Ford F150 pickup. "It doesn't have to look pretty but it needs to get me there, and it does. My husband wired it to burn corn liquor as a fuel, so I don't have to worry about a fuel supply."

Ingenuity is the key in the former land of cotton, where old times are not forgotten, but wished for. Ken Beauregard converted his 2009 Chevy Silverado pickup so that it would burn biomass products - tree remnants or grass cuttings, mostly.

"If we had a reliable source of fuel, I might not have done that," said Beauregard, a contractor. "I need a way to haul stuff. So this is what I'm doing. Besides, if I ever need spare parts, I've got the world's biggest junkyard to the south."

"The world's biggest junkyard" is the Mississippi Gulf Coast, which was shattered during the 2005 hurricane season. The high cost of rebuilding kept the Gulf Coast from ever being inhabited again. Now, when residents of the areas north of the coast need building supplies or car repair supplies, they head down to Biloxi or Gulfport or Pascagoula to get what they need.

I.S. officials sense an opportunity here.

"If we can get a trade deal worked out with the Bible Belt, we'd like to sell them some cars," said Mark Hassan, a spokesman for the Islamic States Motor Association, a trade-industry group. "We can do the conversions for biomass and alcohol up here, if they're worried about that. But we think that after 20 years of peace, they might want cars built by other Americans."


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