I have been afflicted just lately by the urge to take a long walk.

Actually this feels more like an obsession.

Anyway this compulsion, or whatever it is, to embark on a hike of epic rather than merely respectable length has barged into my subconscious and latched on with the adhesive stubbornness of a barnacle.

Or an ABBA song.

(Say what you will about that quartet of Swedes, but they knew how to craft a pop hook. I defy you to silence the chorus of “Dancing Queen” once it has command of your internal juke box. Or I should say your internal iPod; I need to update my metaphors.)

We never thought we’d write this, but here goes:

We sort of wish Portland Mayor Sam Adams was in charge of the Forest Service.

Well, maybe not the entire Forest Service. But at least the agency’s camping rules.

Get ready, Baker County drivers.

They’re coming for our studded tires.

And this time the “they” isn’t Oregon’s legislators, who have failed to banish studded tires from the state’s roads despite concerns dating to the early 1970s about the damage the tires cause to pavement.

This time it’s our fellow voters.

And we in the thinly populated lands east of the Cascades know too well why that’s significant.

I understand why people are congregating on Wall Street, hoisting signs and chanting slogans.

Well, I kind of understand.

The economy stinks.

And Wall Street is the symbolic, and malodorous, heart of the putrefying American financial system.

(Washington, D.C., serving, of course, as its calcified brain.)

Parading these decrepit organs, as it were, through downtown Des Moines wouldn’t make the point quite so explicitly.

(Although geographic proximity proved no deterrent to the sympathetic protesters who descended last week on several other cities, among them Portland, where the presence of sign-waving hordes is as predictable as autumn rain puddles.)

What’s not clear to me, though, is which actions we’re supposed to take against the omnipotent cabal that controls America — the so-called 1-percenters — that will confer any tangible benefit on everyone else.

And by “we” I mean the voters.

The federal government has managed to make the possible closure of one of Baker County’s larger private employers seem downright merciful.

Ash Grove Cement Co.’s plant near Durkee, 27 miles southeast of Baker City, employs about 116 people.

The plant has an annual payroll of about $9 million. It’s also the county’s second-biggest taxpayer, putting $727,000 into the county’s coffers last fiscal year.

In other words, Ash Grove is a vital part of Baker County economy — more so since the county recently endured its highest August jobless rate (9.2 percent) in a quarter-century.