When I was still a kid, maybe around age 10 at the time, my daddy was taking the three oldest of us boys somewhere when we came upon a truck loaded with firewood that was stopped in the middle of the road.

It was a mess, because a good part of the load had shifted when the driver was going around a turn, and, with Dad not saying much, we all piled out and helped the guy, who had two boys of his own with him, gather the logs and right the load.

It made no difference the man was black and we were white, nor did it matter his boys weren’t dressed as well as we were. All that mattered was that the woodcutter was in a bind and we’d come along at the right time to help.

I thought about that Saturday morning at breakfast when, on the front page of the Atlanta newspaper, there was a huge color picture of the Tennessee River gorge under a headline that blared, “Could Tennessee River Help Rescue Georgia?” A smaller headline, still easily readable, read, “Volunteer State Unlikely To Rally To The Idea.”

The story was about the drought, of course, and hinted of impending doom for Atlanta if the heavily-parched lakes that quench the city don’t soon get rain relief, but as high as the second paragraph a United States senator from Tennessee was quoted as saying he was “adamantly opposed” to any such of a transfer.

The article, brilliantly written by Dan Chapman, pointed out for such a thing to take place, it would take “a tsunami’s worth of political, technical, environmental and financial” doings for it to ever happen, but that Chattanooga was just a mile from the Georgia border and made the best sense to ease what could quite easily become a huge catastrophe.

In a non-related story in the same edition of the same newspaper, a lawyer recalled one of Yogi Berra’s great lines when he remembered the zany baseball manager once blurted, “Predictions are very difficult, especially when you are talking about the future”, but the learned head-scratchers are saying the region’s drought conditions are expected to stick around another year or so and may even get worse.

Atlanta’s metropolitan population is now over 5 million and – right now – Lake Lanier is at 40 percent of its capacity and Lake Allatoona is at 33 percent, according to Saturday’s story. It was also pointed out that during normal conditions the average water flow of the Tennessee River in Chattanooga is 34,300 cubic feet per second, which is 17 times that of the Chattahoochee River at the Buford Dam.

Well, I’m sitting there reading all of this as I sopped a biscuit through what was left of my egg yokes and grits, and while the food was fine, I was getting a bad taste in my mouth. Even some jelly didn’t help.

As I continue to read, the idea was broached that maybe Chattanooga could swap that “bullet train” idea with Georgia as a trade of some kind, with water flowing down one side of I-75 while the train zipped down the other side. The trouble with that, of course, is that only a “no good” holds out his hand when somebody otherwise helpless is in a tight spot.

Then I read where the state of Tennessee, fearful that someday Atlanta might come calling, passed a stern set of laws back in 2000 under Gov. Don Sunquist’s administration that is called the Inter-Basin Water Transfer Act that virtually prohibits any water transfers out of the Tennessee River basin.

The Tennessee-American Water Company sells the city of Dalton three million gallons of water every day and several more North Georgia utilities depend on the TAWC, which, of course, draws what it uses at no cost from the river.

The writer quoted Dodd Galbreath, who is the executive director of the Institute for Sustainable Practice at David Lipscomb, as saying, “Once you give away water, it’s almost impossible to get it back. Georgia, Alabama and Florida cannot agree (on the Chattahoochee River) so why would anybody agree on the Tennessee River?”

Then came the clincher, at least it was for me. Galbreath said, “The state of Tennessee will be very hesitant to share its river not because it’s selfish, but because it’s not sustainable.”

When did the United States of America become the “Separate States of America?” We’re in this together and we’re all each other’s got. As far as I’m concerned, if Atlanta’s in trouble, we’re in trouble too.

Let me tell you something, the people all over the state of Georgia are our neighbors and, if 5 million in just Atlanta alone are faced with going without, the politicians and the money-grubbers and the endangered mussels are in for a bad day as far as I am concerned.

When are we going to start electing politicians who, instead of being “adamantly opposed”, are looking for ways to make things work? I’m not panicky, but this drought thing is real and the winners on both sides of the state line will be the ones who figure out solutions instead of reasons we shouldn’t help one another.

We already know that FEMA needs to stay in New Orleans and heaven help us all if the same crowd that has worked on I-75 for the past 30 years gets the bid for the ditch, everybody in Atlanta will shrivel up.

Gov. Sonny Perdue has the right idea on that prayer thing. We got over two inches of rain within 24 hours after his last heavenly plea, but now’s the time to pray even more instead of less.

I can’t help but believe this – if we get the right people in the game right now we won’t have to worry when the “worst case scenario” hits because … well, we’ll have picked all that cord wood that was scattered across the road like me and my brothers did a long time ago.

As we finished helping that man and his sons stack that firewood on that old battered flat-bed, I’ll never forget the look in those men’s eyes.

When a person’s in a bind the time for talking is afterwards.

royexum@aol.com