Finding a camp that fits the kid

“Are you a baseball kid or a soccer kid?” a man, who is not my son’s father, asks him.

Before Ben can answer, the man blurts out, “Well, you’re doing some sport this summer because you have an awfully good tan for a New York City kid.”

My New York City kid and I are in Maine, visiting sleep-away camps set on what any urbanite would call a lake but which up here are called ponds. This is our third camp in two days, and we’re headed for New Hampshire to see more. Before we return to Manhattan, we’ll drive 600 miles, eat three lobsters, buy bags of sweat socks at an outlet mall, swim at 7:30 on a misty morning in one of those ponds, and accompany Norah Jones about a thousand times on the same song as we navigate country roads in our rental car.

This is Mom and Ben’s fabulous tour of sleep-away camps, really, a rite of passage for both of us. My Ben is 10, and most of his friends are already living six to a bunk, playing sports all day and gorging on peanut butter all night. He wasn’t ready to go away this summer. Or maybe I wasn’t ready for him to go. In any case, he went to day camp a grueling 50-minute bus ride from the city and played on a Little League team on dusty city fields every weekend. Next summer he is determined to spend his time amid towering pine trees.

This is what we do on the East Coast: We label dozens of pairs of socks and pack up our kids with several wool blankets and boxes of blank stationery and ship them to the north country for the summer. It’s kind of barbaric. To those who live outside of Manhattan -- especially to those who live in Southern California, where it is possible to play sports in shirt sleeves 365 days a year -- this is one more proof that children here are, in Woody Allen’s phrase, “two with nature.” If they play weekend soccer, they have to be bused over a bridge to an island in the East River where the fields are slippery with duck poop. An outdoor swimming hole? There was once a pool on the roof of a motel on the West Side, but the Chinese government took it over.

In other words, just to play outside requires a tense negotiation and a pledge not to resist if a gang sweeps through demanding tribute -- not that we have seen such louts except in the movies. In pursuit of an “authentic” outdoor experience for our children, we look for summer camps that have remained for decades unchanged -- the owners would say “unspoiled” -- although we want them vastly upgraded.

And there have been innovations since I went off to camp 37 years ago. Instead of offering a lot of mountain climbing, camps now offer adventures on huge wooden climbing walls built within view, of course, of real mountain ranges. Instead of the eight weeks my mother and I each spent our first time away from home, Ben has the option to go only for 3 1/2 weeks. Neither I nor my husband, a city boy who spent one rainy week at a summer camp run by an urban renewal community group, could stand to have Ben gone that long. (His little sister, of course, would be delighted.) Nevertheless, at an average of $1,000 a week, eight weeks is just not affordable.

The first camp we visited was kind of scruffy. The playing fields were brownish, and our tour guide admitted the food was awful. Every table in the dining hall was set with silverware, plastic cups, two loaves of white bread and a jar of peanut butter. But I was attracted to this camp because it had a reputation for being less competitive and, in fact, was known as the “sports camp for bed wetters.”

Ben turned to me the minute we were alone in the car and said, “OK, Mom, if I had to decide right now this would be the place. I loved it.” I was a little taken aback. “You did? Why?” He couldn’t quite explain. But after every tour he said the same thing: “OK, as of right now, this is the place.” It all looked like great fun to him -- boys and sports and Game Boys on every bed!

It occurred to me I’d have to “influence” his decision or Ben would end up either picking the last camp we visited or the one that offered the nicest T-shirts or regular “casino nights” in the dining hall. But what do I really want for him?

There are literally thousands of boys and girls camps, of every variety, tucked into the woods of New England. The ones we visited all had roughly 200 boys who, overscheduled during the school year, are kept busy seven “activity periods” a day, with breaks for meals and resting. The 20-something counselors, half from foreign countries, all looked vaguely alike with their Adam’s apples bobbing and their bathing suits dangerously low on their hips. There were optional trips into the wilderness as well as hiking, canoeing and plenty of intra-camp competition, camp sing-alongs and color wars. Most of the arts and crafts, drama and riding programs were minimal. The attitude gnawed at me: Boys don’t want to throw clay; they only want to throw balls. This is accurate, but is it true of Ben?

At every stop, on every playing field, at every lakeside, I looked for signs of happiness, searching for satisfied smiles among all the little faces huffing and puffing on water skis and through games of flag football. I saw a lot of freckles and unbrushed teeth between goofy grins. But were these happy campers? Would Ben settle in to these jock havens?

Most parents don’t visit camps until after the fact -- on parents weekend. Most rely, as I also did, on “camp ladies,” consultants who are paid by camps to wrangle customers. You describe what you’re looking for and the camp ladies refer your name to various camp owners. The owners send videos and glossy brochures and start calling. Can they come to your house to talk to you, to your son? Like old-fashioned circuit riders, these hearty salesmen come promising tradition and spirit and a safe environment.

When I was growing up in Connecticut, instead of videos, the owners hauled around slide shows or invited newcomers to gatherings in hotel ballrooms. I spent two summers on a misbegotten adventure at a camp for rich Jewish girls. My mother thought she was giving her three awkward daughters the best by signing us up for the fanciest girls camp in Maine and -- big surprise -- each of us bombed out, making no friends, no “lasting memories” like the brochures promise. All I remember is being miserably homesick, getting whacked in the shin playing field hockey, and the food. Which was better than what I got at home.

Perhaps it was the smell of the pine trees or the showers behind the bunks, but during my trip with Ben I had several flashbacks to my two lonely summers away from home. Yet by the time we left our last camp in New Hampshire, I began to understand what had gone awry for the Baum sisters at camp. My mother, rather than find a camp that suited our sophistication level and temperaments, found one that matched her aspirations for us -- to be well-bred girls, good athletes and socially at ease. But we had neither the self-confidence nor the straight (ironed) hair of successful 1960s suburban princesses. We were geeks, spirited on the tennis court but clumsy. We belonged at an unpretentious, low-key camp, one that attracted wholesome girls to its run-down facilities and bad food.

After we visited our last camp, Ben said, “Well, Mom, I gotta say, that place is the winner. If I had to decide right now where I’m going next summer, that’s where I’d go.”

This time, though, I agreed with him. In fact, all through the tour by Rob, who’d been director there for 20 some years, I had to restrain myself from shrieking joyfully at everything he said. There were only four periods a day, not seven; there was no electricity, no Game Boys, no fans in the cabins; the boys slept under mosquito netting because the cabins were sensibly if not picturesquely located on the lake so the breezes kept them cool. Some boys brought instruments to camp and could choose to play in a jazz band or take a lesson during free time in the afternoon; if they wanted to play sports all day, every day, that was OK too. There was one of everything -- baseball field, soccer field, set of archery targets and tennis courts. And unlike the all-sports-all-the-time camps, which had no nature programs or shops to speak of, this camp’s offerings were so impressive that boys clamored to spend double periods tacking butterflies to boards and labeling them or shaving blocks of wood into baseball bats.

This was the New England that I had grown up in, laid-back, spare, athletic but big on self-reliance and lush in nature. It was understated and strutting its understatement. This, I decided, is what I want for Ben.

Just before we left this camp, I noticed in a bunk for 11-year-olds, a boy had thrown a stuffed animal on his cot along side a lacrosse stick and dirty shin guards. Ben also noticed.

“You know,” I said with studied casualness as we were driving south through Boston, “if you wanted to bring Ernie to camp next summer you probably could.”

“Mom,” my slightly disgusted traveling companion told me, “don’t you think I know that?”