I’d like to believe that Chris Dudley can help to etch a couple more wrinkles on John Kitzhaber’s rugged face before Nov. 2.

It’s not that I’m rooting for Dudley.

I am in fact registered as an independent. My vote likely will remain in play until the cottonwoods have started to tinge yellow.

And anyway blowouts, whether in football or gubernatorial races, bore me.

Yet as much as I pine for a healthy tussle, I just can’t silence the interior voice which insists that Dudley, who couldn’t poll a majority from among his own party in the primary, has little chance to pull the monumental upset over Kitzhaber.

Maybe I could believe otherwise if the Democrats had gone for Bill Bradbury.

Or for anybody, come to that, except the denim-clad doctor who has a deft touch with a fly rod and who leaps to the aid of seizure-suffering debate watchers.

(Neither Karl Rove nor Rahm Emanuel has ever arranged a scene so serendipitous as the one that played out during a Kitzhaber-Bradbury debate in Eugene last month. Although I remain skeptical that somebody actually hollered, verbatim, “Is there a doctor in the house?” after a man in the audience fell ill.)

From 1981 to 1991 I served as Chief of Police in Coronado, California. The southern limits of that city were just one mile from the international border with Mexico. The problem of illegal immigration existed then, though it pales by comparison to what exists today.

Because my city was impacted by the downsides of illegal immigration we met regularly with Mexican officials, including the Tijuana, Mexico, police chief and Mexican federal officials to discuss the issue.

In the mid 1980s, Tijuana was blessed with a very well-educated, ethical and professional police chief who was quite knowledgeable concerning crime problems in his country, demographics, and what the future might hold in terms of the illegal alien problem. In our conversations he made a number of predictions, many of them dire, and most of which have come to pass over the years.

My futility as an elk hunter has finally attracted the attention of Oregon’s wildlife managers.

And if I may be so bold, belated attention it is.

Although I suppose they have wolves with a taste for mutton and veal to worry about, and those sea lions munching salmon, and the occasional coyote snatching suburban cats.

Still, the scale of my ineptitude in the pursuit of elk had some years back attained the status of legend, at least in my view, and so I can’t help but feel that the biologists have failed to give my constant failure the recognition it deserves.

I’m not talking about buck fever, either. Or bull fever, as the case may be.

Any hunter can miss an elk at 500 yards.

(And many have.)

I rated myself as a pretty fair singer right up to the indelible instant when I heard my naked voice, the protective filter of accompaniment by actual musicians stripped away.

For some years previous I had often amused myself, as I suspect most people do, by crooning along with the stereo while I was driving alone.

Which is about as realistic as playing Tiger Woods golf on a Wii.

Harmonizing with Lennon and McCartney, suffice it to say, ranks on the difficulty scale right beside bisecting the fairway with a 300-yard drive.

(Although Tiger isn’t staying on the short grass all that often these days, either.)

One day, for some reason I’ve forgotten (although a reason no doubt spawned by the same hormone that leads high school students to use Bunson burners for unorthodox purposes), I decided to try what you might call an experiment in a cappella.

What resulted was a sort of auditory shock treatment that cured my naivete, as regards my lyrical ability, instantly and irrevocably.

While I was belting out the chorus to some ’80s anthem — I think it was Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian,” although possibly it was “The Final Countdown” by Europe — I punched the radio’s “off” button.

Ted Carlin intends to walk clear across Oregon this month, and I’m jealous.

He also plans to spend a couple nights at the Sky Hook motel in Mitchell.

This guy is really trying to goad me.

Not intentionally, perhaps, seeing as how we’ve not met.

But I don’t care about that.

The Sky Hook is my favorite motel.

At least it’s my favorite motel that I’ve never stayed in.

There is, most obviously, that name.

I’ve driven past the Sky Hook probably half a hundred times, and whenever I see that neon sign I think briefly of Kareem, flicking the ball softly, just high enough to foil Walton or Gilmore or Lanier.

The thing about owning a four-wheel drive rig is that without even trying you can get into situations that you would avoid like the hantavirus if you owned a lesser vehicle.

Many of these situations, sadly, involve a significant risk of multiple fractures.

The current crop of off-roaders, I’ll concede, is somewhat less malignant in certain ways than its predecessors.

Computer-controlled nannies such as traction control and anti-lock brakes can extricate clumsy drivers from predicaments that would have left their forebears high-centered on somebody’s front porch.

As a result, four-by-fours, if they can’t actually defy physics, can temporarily stun it with a sharp blow to the chin.

They can also, to put the matter in less pleasant terms, get you into a mess which no stack of microprocessors can make right.

As I meet with people throughout our council, I have been asked why I, or we, did not respond to the editorials and stories about the recent verdict against the Boy Scouts in Portland.

At the court’s direction, we have been, and continue to be, restricted in communications about this case. Because this matter continues, the Judge has asked that the Boy Scouts of America refrain from comment on the specific allegations.

However, I must comment and respond to the mischaracterization in a recent editorial (in a different publication) that we are not concerned about protecting youth.

As a movement Scouting does care very deeply about the safety of our members and all youth, and always has. Abuse is a huge problem in our society. According to Childhelp.org there are 3.2 million reported abuse cases in the United States every year. We are one of only a few agencies that has a rigorous, nationwide system of background checks of every registered volunteer leader and employee — conducted through an independent service — which attempts to keep out of the program those individuals who should not be leading youth.

The unemployment rate in Oregon has been in double digits for the past year, but it seems as though many politicians in the nation’s capital are focused on creating frustration and gridlock instead of new jobs.

Bipartisanship isn’t completely dead, though. Recently, I joined with members of both parties, including Republican Senators Richard Lugar of Indiana and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, to introduce a bill that will both create jobs and lower monthly energy bills for families and businesses.

It’s called the Rural Energy Savings Program and it works like this: Rural electric co-ops like the Oregon Trail Electric Consumers Co-op in Baker City will administer low-cost loans to help families and business owners afford the up-front costs of energy efficient renovations. The families and business owners will see their energy bills go down, and can pay off the loan out of these savings. In fact, they can pay it back with a charge on their electric bill, so they don’t even have to pay an additional bill.

There’s a heap of roads in Eastern Oregon and I’ve gone the wrong way on quite a lot of them.

And sometimes even when I take the right turn I come to a bad end. Usually rocks are involved. Sometimes there are snowdrifts. Always there is profanity.

I have at any rate become accustomed to running into trouble — literally, in many cases — when I set out to cover great distances by motor vehicle without ever putting a tire on pavement.

Which goal I continue to pursue, afflicted as I am with a sort of cheerful stupidity, despite my frequent flirtations with disaster.

I strive to prepare properly for these outings. For instance I own enough maps to wallpaper my whole house. (I have in fact experimented along those lines, but my decorative efforts were rebuffed, and resoundingly, despite their obvious educational value.)

But though I grasp the basic idea behind a map, I am helpless to decipher, with any reliability, the overwhelmingly detailed guides the BLM puts out for the millions of acres it manages in the southeastern part of the state.

It seems to me not so long ago when most every Second World War veteran I met looked hale enough to still wield an M-1 Garand or drive a Sherman tank.

But that era, however near it might feel to me, has passed us all by, inevitable as the tides.

There is nothing to be gained from pretending otherwise.

Although I’ll bet some of those aging fellows still get their buck.

The math is simple, and blunt.

The war ended in August 1945.

Even allowing for those soldiers and sailors who turned the military’s flank, as regards the minimum enlistment age, it’s unlikely that any veteran is younger than 82.

Which means even those men, who probably took up a weapon before they ever handled a shaving razor, have already been defying the actuarial tables for all of half a decade.