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My 4-year-old son is obsessed with getting lost. As he watches his dad preparing for a bison hunting trip, he warns him not to take too many turns. “How will Daddy find his way back home?” he wonders out loud.

Owen went along with him once. They picked their way through a field, looking for signs of the herd. When Mike spotted some tracks, he ran ahead, following them beyond a slight dip in the topography. Owen started to cry. Then he decided to walk back to the snowmachine, where he felt safe.

As Mike retraced his steps, he realized Owen wasn’t in the same spot anymore and started running in his haste to find him. They were each struggling with the thought of losing each other, rejoicing out loud at their reunion, as ordinary as it seemed from my perspective.

Everyone has a different idea of what it means to be lost. When I moved here from the East Coast, with its rabbit warren of highways and routes to choose from, offering more than one way to get from a town to the next, I felt so out of context.

For the first year I stayed safely within the confines of the village, exploring its one main road and walking along the riverfront street to get to work and the grocery store. I caught rides to the radio tower beyond the edge of town or to meet a friend at the bar on the other end.

I knew the community, recognized the potholes and the fiddlehead stands, pointing out for visitors where the rose hips grew and where a culvert carried overflow back to the river. Yet, I could still get lost when a local took me to a cabin for a party or out to the pond for ice skating.

I only ventured outside in an airplane bound for the unfamiliar streets of Fairbanks. Eventually, I got braver, trusting the Yukon River trails and the back of a traveling companion to bring me from one village to the next. Under that giant sky, an expanse like the ocean’s opposite, I’d get vertigo. Sometimes I longed for street signs.

If there are two kinds of people in the world, I’m a city person, finding my way through any man-made roadmap with ease. Others are more comfortable in the woods, using cut banks or a slough to mark the way. When I visit my childhood home, I’m amazed at how well I can still navigate the neighborhood.

I make turns and cross streets without even knowing their names. Some inner sense takes over. A layer below active thought, the same place I imagine all my subconscious actions residing, like the way my fingers find the letters “w” and “a” on the keyboard when I can’t even conjure them up in my mind.

Getting lost in Alaska carries a deeper meaning. When I tell my family Owen’s story, I can see the stereotypes in their wide eyes. They imagine danger and wilderness wilder than their inner-city streets. I hurry to explain that this trail where Owen and his dad were hunting is more like a highway, an expanse of wind-flattened snow and criss-crossing snowmachine tracks.

It’s not as if our son was truly lost. He wasn’t in a department store, wandering through a forest of unfamiliar legs, at risk for whatever scary ending those kinds of stories lead to. I ask myself whether Owen will always remember this experience, like the time I got separated from my family on the boardwalk at the beach, my eyes whipping from one stranger’s face to another, fear pulling my stomach down into my feet.

If we don’t know what it feels like to be lost, how will we know when we’re found.

Even here in Fairbanks, where I’ve worn a path along the edge of the streets in my neighborhood, I still get disoriented. So do my friends, confused by the nearby intersection of Sixth and Eighth Avenues. They end up on short-lived stretches of road known as Badger or Lincoln, searching for a familiar landmark, the right place to turn.

I’ve stumbled upon shops and restaurants that I recognize from my visits when I still lived in the village. After being in my own house for almost five years, I suddenly realized that the place where I bought my first car is right around the corner.

The woods, no matter how many times I venture into them, exploring the flow of traffic and trying to learn its lessons, will always be exotic to me. I’ll still go, but this is why I live in a city. As small and remote as Fairbanks is compared to where I’ve come from, it’s where I feel safe, where I want to come home to.

A place to wander and never feel lost.