Mirages of Summer : * The image, as shown in those irresistible full-color brochures, often does not match the reality.

Last week a friend called to tell me she had signed her son up at summer camp. From the way she went on about this place you would have thought it promised to prepare kids for a shot at the Olympics. Among its offerings were boogie-boarding, bodysurfing, mountain biking, water-skiing and canoeing. And these were just for starters. Next, her Johnny would be rappelling down mountain cliffs and bungee jumping off suspension bridges.

I thought about this kid. Johnny is, as far as I know, allergic to physical activity. He’s the kind of kid who has to be really up to play a game of jacks. I got a sudden flash of him panting after a long line of robust boys, his glasses askew, his face as mottled as the inside of a watermelon.

That brought back my own memories as a summer camper. The most vivid memories center on a boil the size of Cincinnati that appeared on my back the second day of camp and made all physical activity excruciating. Serving a volleyball felt like a back peel. In baseball, I could only manage grounders.

At first the other kids seemed sympathetic but soon they stopped picking me for teams. They started giggling when they asked how I was doing. Not long after that they were calling me “Vesuvius.”

Finally, after an eternity of helping the counselors count and sort equipment, I recovered, but my troubles were far from over. The program had shifted to water sports. A new enemy surfaced in the form of grapefruit-sized bluebottle flies that zoomed straight for me during canoe practice. My canoeing partner, of course, had to be the toughest girl in camp who watched stonily as the flies dove and I, flailing, tipped us over. That night she got back at me by putting a small army of centipedes in my bunk.

Memories like these die hard. No wonder I have been letting my children stay home for the summer. They can hone their skills at that great summer game, SuperNintendo.

Oh sure, we tried camp one year. It was at one of those schools up on Mulholland Drive that resembles a country club when you drive past. What no one tells you is that in August those places heat up like foundries. The first day my daughter was there, the kids fainted from heat prostration. After that the counselors confined them to special underground rooms where they talked about Native Americans and made prayer mats out of buffalo chips and flattened tuna cans.

From time to time vans showed up to ferry the youngsters to the swimming pool at a YMCA in Van Nuys. For this I paid a tuition roughly equal to the GNP of Luxembourg.

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Parents such as me are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to camp. On the one hand there’s the lure, expensive but irresistible, as shown in those full-color camp brochures: kids riding horseback, swimming, singing around the campfire.

On the other side are the less photogenic realities--nature on the rampage: wasps’ nests, lake water the temperature of Pluto, bugs left over from the Pleistocene era. Worse yet, there’s that bottom line of children’s social lives, the pecking order.

Not everybody rides high in the saddle.

A case in point was my friend Aileen from the fifth grade. I remember the day she came back from a camp in the Catskills. I naturally was poised to sympathize. In a way that I could relate to, her bony little body was pock-marked with mosquito bites, streaked with calamine lotion. As she talked about her experience her face went from streaked to stippled.

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One day a bunch of tough girls had called her “four eyes,” ripped off her glasses and thrown them in the lake. Another clique pulled off her pajama top to make fun of her tiny asymmetrical breasts. “The worst was when my spaghetti started to move,” she wept. Someone had laced it with live fish bait.

Finally, Aileen told me, she got fed up. One morning she and another girl sneaked off from their tormentors. Instead of swimming, hiking, biking and riding, they threw themselves on their backs in a secluded spot across the lake. First they just lounged around and talked. After a while they skimmed a few smooth stones across the water. Then they lay down again and looked up at the clouds and made up stories about what they saw. They ate some lunch, played a little catch, fell asleep.

Ah, if only camps could promise that kind of summer for our kids. Those endless, suspended moments of self-forgetting. No pressure. No responsibilities. Peace.

Now that would be worth the GNP of Luxembourg.