A river runs through it.

• Position: Brief Article

You can never step in the same river twice

Heraclitus

Heraclitus, a Greek who was doing philosophy before Plato made it cool, was saying something every business person understands: Change is constant. With deluge and drought, a river ebbs and flows. It surges and snakes, digging deeper into its channel, chiseling its banks, even occasionally rerouting itself. (Memo to consultants: Change management isn't new; Heraclitus was saying this 2,500 years ago.)

But the truth is, you can step in the same river. We're doing it in this, the 20th anniversary issue of BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA. And twice. This month's cover story, by Senior Editor Ed Martin, revisits a topic, water shortages, we covered in 1982, BNC's first year. Another topic we covered then, Golden Corral Corp., is revisited this month by Charles Heatherly and Frank Maley. More on that in a minute.

Our repeat of the water story wasn't intentional. Ed, as he traveled around the state working on other stories, just kept hearing the same tales from local officials and economic developers: "Almost everywhere I went, somebody had a water problem."

When Ed was on the coast writing about one of the state's last country doctors, he learned that rural Hyde County was the first in the country to depend for its drinking water solely on reverse osmosis -- the same method used in Saudi Arabia. When up in Buncombe County writing about U.S. Rep. Charles Taylor, Ed heard of mountain streams and wells going dry.

Something Ed didn't know then: Many of the towns in trouble were the same ones that had problems 20 years ago.

Take Greensboro. Back in the early '80s, folks there were talking about how the proposed Randleman reservoir would slake the city's thirst by 2000. Now, Randleman isn't expected to come online until 2005, and...