A STELLAR VACATION

for the perfect getaway that isn't more work than our real work, and won't plunge our plastic in, and isn't too packaged so as to make us have too cute an adventure, and doesn't torture our buns in a seminar. Something real. No spa-sprawling. No life-risking. It would be nice if it felt like the word "party!" felt when you were 21, free, and had a pocketful of cash and car keys.

Well, I may have found it. It's the moral equivalent of partying. It costs $20; it's a beautiful drive; they feed you pasta; you're with other relaxed, good-humored people; you're outside, safe and remote in the high desert of central Oregon; it's not strenuous or dangerous at all; and you get to go billions of light years into deep space. Also, it has the word "party" in it.

They call it the Oregon Star Party. In August, hundreds of nice people who own expensive telescopes camp in this big prairie in the Ochoco Mountains past Prineville, and, for three nights, let you look through their telescopes, absolutely free, and even tell you what you're looking at, how far away it is and what it means.

You're stumbling around in the dark with 300 other people, talking softly, like you were in a cathedral. Which you are. The desert is lit up by the Milky Way, which, if you have not seen far from light pollution, you've not seen at all. It's what our ancestors for 5 million years had as their nightly wallpaper, and we, since Edison, have not. We need that awe. We need to feel small at least once a day.

You hear the word "wow" whispered a lot. You've seen pictures of these nebulae and clusters, but until you walk up to a yard-wide scope and put your eye to that eyepiece and let your whole self just leap out of this world across countless light years, you have not seen it. It's like the difference between reading about the facts of life and finally experiencing them.

"Wanna see Andromeda?" says a voice in the dark. "Sure. What is it?" They are helpful. "It's the galaxy most like ours, a flattened spiral, has about 50 billion stars, only about 750,000 light years away. It's our sister galaxy. Actually, we're going to collide with it in a few billion years."

I climb the stepladder and put my eye to it. "It's what our galaxy would look like if we could get outside it," someone adds. I have never seen a whole galaxy before. It's like looking at a real cave-era skull or a real rock from the moon. Your mind has to regroup itself around a much different and larger concept that does not include you and your job and your bills and your world history and your anything. And that's stress-relieving. And awe-inducing.

I show the children for a moment, but they don't seem to know what they are looking at. I've tried to tell them on the drive over the Cascades and at my favorite espresso bar in Bend. "You see, we're on this planet and the sun is really a star, but just one of billions in the Milky Way ..."

They sort of get it at ages 7 and 9, but the word "billion" is not awesome to them yet. They want to get back to our camp and sleep. What really teaches them proper awe is spreading out the sleeping bags under the Milky Way and lying there all cozy and letting that big white band fill up their retinas. I think our eyes have some actual biological need for looking at stars as we drift off to sleep.

"Dad, can we ever go out there?"

"Sure. We will. We have to. You know, we've been to all the worlds and moons that go around the sun. With cameras, that is."

"Was anyone there?"

"No. Only here. We have to look farther, many light years away, which is, well, you would grow old and die trying to just get there."

"So how are we going to get there?"

"I don't know. Probably like Captain Picard. Stars whizzing by. Do you guys want to go?" They think about it.

"I want to be safe and have air and trees," says Colin. "And my family," says Hannah. "I would be lonely."

They fall quiet. I look at them. Their eyes are open. They don't need no stinkin' telescopes. They're doing the stars as our ancestors did. Now the air cools and they pull close. A meteor leaves a fat trail across the sky. They gasp, then settle back into the Milky Way. They will never forget this night. That's why I brought them.