For many of us, wild places – forest, open savanna and even the empty field beyond the back fence – feel like home.

Most of us just weren’t hard-wired for an endless diet of asphalt, traffic and the steady drone of suburban sameness. At least not without some unrefined terrain to punctuate the featureless grist.

The moment I pull out of town (north, south, east or west, it doesn’t seem to matter), or even go for a walk along the river or up Pilot Butte, is the moment my perspective begins to change. There’s nothing humdrum about a bald eagle soaring out over the water and perching on a lakeside snag. There’s something innately satisfying about the inverted V of a squadron’s worth of Canada geese veering south. Or the feeling you get when you’re going back home.

Dave Frewing and Dave Thomas can tell you all about that. And so can I, because I was with them when they went.

Frewing, who’s a second-generation Forest Service guy, a walking-talking encyclopedia of the Central Oregon hinterlands and, as fate would have it, my next-door neighbor, was kind enough to show me the place where he spent much of his early life. He and his father, Darrell, his mother, Lois, his brother Bert and sisters Myrna and Ellen, lived at Allison Ranger Station in the Snow Mountain Ranger District of the Ochoco National Forest from 1939 through 1944. That time span encompassed the first five years of young Dave’s life.

The family spent about seven months each year at Allison, wintering in far-off Prineville.

”We skidded in in the spring and skidded out in the fall,” Frewing recalled.

In the interim, they watched over this remote section of forest and made a scrapbook full of memories. Frewing showed me the creek from which he caught his first fish, the house (still standing) where he lived, the office where his father conducted business. And he spoke of visits with the local ranchers, collecting snow for homemade ice cream on the 4th of July, traveling to the erstwhile town of Supplee to get the mail.

Frewing’s father lived the life of the early-day forester: fighting fires, grading roads, managing forest resources and helping visitors. His mother, who now lives in Bend, was famous for her bottomless pot of coffee, Frewing said.

For the record, the Allison Guard Station, a complex of several buildings in a sizable clearing just up the road from Delintment Lake on Forest Road 41, looked much smaller to Frewing than it did 61 summers ago.

Thomas, a retired electrical engineer and a friend of Frewing’s, was an adventuresome young man in 1950 when he spent the summer atop Bald Butte as a fire spotter. When he left the mountain that fall, he never looked back.

After a brief pit stop at Delintment Lake, we rumbled down Forest Road 41 toward Burns. Thomas, in the back seat with a map, grew more excited as we approached an unmarked turnoff he remembered only dimly. When we poked the nose of our rig up the little gravel artery and Thomas caught a glimpse of the rebuilt lookout tower above us on the snakey path, it was as if he grew younger by the switchback.

He bounded up the stairs to the top of the 60-foot structure and took in the view. From a similar vantage, Thomas spotted his one and only fire 55 years ago. He reported the smoke, raced to the scene and fought it for more than a dozen hours before it was deemed under control. Then, exhausted, he wolfed down leg of lamb in a sheep herder’s camp and rode back to the tower with the district ranger. It was a day he’s remembered vividly all his life.

He told us about killing a rattler there by the outhouse (a necessity), and shooting a badger (an act for which he’s felt some residual shame). He talked of a visit from his mother and sister, a soaring hawk he engaged when he needed to talk and a joint in Burns where the bar segued seamlessly into a gun shop.

Thomas soaked it all in and then turned his back to this defining symbol of his youth, pledging to bring his wife to this special place ”before the snow flies.”

Whether he gets back or not, his perspective has been altered.

Home. Sometimes just knowing that it’s there is solace enough.

Although we reached Allison and Bald Butte via a series of state, county and gravel roads through the Maury Mountains and on to the Snow Mountain Ranger District, many will be impassable with the onset of winter weather. The best route this fall is east on U.S. Highway 20 to Hines and right (northwest) on Road 41. Bald Butte is on Road 4117. Allison Ranger Station is farther up Road 41, a few miles past Delintment Lake. We spotted a bald eagle at Delintment Lake; it’s worth a stop.

It’s about a 300-mile round trip. Allow a full day for the trip.

Contact: Snow Mountain Ranger District at 541-573-4300 for up-to-date road conditions and closures.