You don’t always need a map, a trail and hiking boots to have a meaningful outdoors experience.

Sometimes all you need is the patch of nature that’s out your backdoor, a willing spirit and a partner to help you see natural wonders at every turn, even in the most (seemingly) mundane of places.

It helps if your nature partner is a kid, and it’s even better when you’re accompanied by a dog. But even in solitude, the outdoors are within most of our grasp without anymore effort than it takes to drive to the outskirts of town.

Your little nature spot could be almost anything — a small park, an undeveloped parcel, an urban trail or one of the handful of natural areas that dot Central Oregon between subdivisions and streets (be polite, though, and don’t abuse private property rights). Last weekend, my son and I explored the Pinewood Natural Area, a sizable swatch of junipers and ponderosas that is sandwiched between housing tracts and streets on Bend’s east side. It’s close enough to home to walk there, but large enough that the irrigation ditch running through it feels a little more like a wild creek than it otherwise would.

But we could have been almost anywhere. The point is, it doesn’t matter where you find your nature fix; the key thing is that you find it, and once you’re there, open your eyes.

For example, on my recent nature walk with my 10-year-old son, I was really paying more attention to getting my dog to walk perfectly on heel than I was to the natural world around me. That is, until my son, Harrison, cried out “Look! Dragonflies!”

I didn’t see them at first, but he guided my eyes to what he had easily spotted: Two iridescent blue dragonflies coupled in flight, darting elegantly across the water of the little “creek.”

From that point on during this nature excursion, I took a cue from Harrison and paid attention.

We abandoned the trail (no chance of getting lost in this little area) and tracked crookedly across the dusty desert, spotting trees we knew the names of and wondering what some of the flowers were called. Harry had recently learned that ponderosas have “puzzle bark” (the bark looks like jigsaw puzzle pieces), making them easy to identify, and he commented that juniper trees have “bacon bark,” which may be unnecessary to their identification, but it sure is funny to think about.

My dog enthusiastically tried to eat some bunch grass, and Harry asked why. I answered the same way my dad did when I asked the same question as a kid: Because she has a tickle in her tummy (Note: this is not a medically sound diagnosis.).

Following the dog’s nose, we hared after tiny tracks in the dust made by some rodent or another. We looked at scat left behind by the resident critters, and listened to the susurrus of the breeze in the tree limbs. I asked Harry what he smelled, and he replied that it smelled like dirt and smoke, which I suppose is as good as any description I’ve heard of the resinous, dry smell of the desert at the dawn of summer.

We climbed rocks and examined larkspurs, one of the few flowers I could actually identify. We looked at the evidence of insects that had long made their home in a fallen ponderosa log, and the evidence of humans with sharp tools and idle hands who had left their marks on the tree, too. The rune-looking gouges left by the people made the beginnings of a good fairy tale about how such marks came to be there.

We talked about games and books and school and summer.

And, we spent long minutes without speaking at all, just soaking up the sun and the air and the sense of being somewhere quiet and peaceful, together.

This, I realize, is what a quick fix of nature can give you. Communion with the air, the trees, the breeze, the dirt. Connection with your kid, your dog, yourself.

It doesn’t matter where it comes from. No map necessary, Just take a walk, find a natural spot and enjoy.