Normally, I don’t bat an eye when faced with the news of a commodity shortage.

A late Florida frost is killing the grapefruit market? I’ll eat bananas.

Home heating costs spiraling through the roof? I’ll put on a hat.

Wild salmon $14 a pound? Catfish goes better with cornbread anyway.

I’ve even developed a quasi-romantic view that the occasional shortage can be good for our souls, jostling our self-satisfaction a bit and reminding us that we can’t have it all, all the time. The American consumerist mantra — which I can transcribe here as “more, now, better, cheaper” — has been a pretty accurate reflection of the way things have turned out over the last 50 years, and in many ways that’s a lovely thing. We’ve escaped the worst of our poverty, and not only that, we’ve put it far enough in our rearview mirrors that paying $2.99 for fresh tomatoes seems like an outrage.

I like a good BLT as much as the next guy, so it seems a little churlish to point out that there are plenty of people on this great green planet that can’t get fresh tomatoes at any price, or if they could, couldn’t scrape up a day’s wage — three bucks — to do it. And while I don’t like to speak for others, it’s conceivable that your average Nepalese yak herder would find our anguish over gas prices a bit amusing: “It costs a lot to gas up your Escalade on your way to Pigeon Forge? I’m terribly sorry. Of all the rotten luck.”

But even my even keel can be disrupted by something truly drastic, and a few weeks ago the AP wires were buzzing with a story about a possible hop shortage in the Pacific Northwest. That region, and Washington in particular, is enduring its worst drought since 1977. Water supplies stand at one-third their normal levels. Affected crops include potatoes, sugar beets, apples, apricots, pears, cherries, and hops. That’s right, hops. Humulus lupulus. Brewer’s gold. God’s gift to the Hardwig family. The twining vine whose blooms give beer the bitters. Those hops.

Now we’re messing with the essentials. The time for bemused torpor has come and gone. My modest proposal is a national mobilization to irrigate the hop fields of the Cascades. New pipes can be laid, rivers diverted, dams built. Dig new wells, seed the clouds, melt the polar ice cap. If that doesn’t work, we’ll ferry in the water by helicopter. (They do it for forest fires, after all.) If them vines are still thirsty, I’ll water them myself.

Say... what are you doing next week? I hear they could use some help up in Yakima. Great. Perfect. I’ll bring the watering can, you bring the Escalade. We’ll get there in no time.

(Jay Hardwig is a writer and teacher. He can be reached at smardwig@charter.net)