WISH YOU WERE HERE ‘STEAD OF ME

I slam my Neon’s door. The scent of sage is sweet, but bad memories waft in the morning mess hall’s din. Three Falls Boy Scout Camp in Frazier Park is my first stop on the weeklong camp tour I’ve been ordered to undertake. Already I’m cringing.

These hills north of Los Angeles feel like desert. Camp director Tom Sitter assures me there are waterfalls somewhere. Unseen springs feed the lake, a square depression in the sand about the size of four swimming pools. But most of the water is gone, siphoned off by firefighting helicopters. There’s no wind either.

Andrew, 13, of Covina says his favorite activity is sailing. The Scouts here get a lot of practice navigating in circles. I turn from the waterfront and squint at the 57-foot rock-climbing wall the Scouts bought after nearly a decade of fundraising.

I worked ropes at a 200-acre lakeside camp in Kent, Conn., where tepees and cabins reeked of bug spray, and soccer-mom, she-devil types in Ray-Bans supervised counselors who were often hung over. There, lightning threatened more than fire. A bolt struck Maggie, my co-worker, a few weeks before I met her. The summer before, she’d landed in the hospital with a broken back after plummeting from our camp’s wall. She would sit on the zip-line platform and spit sunflower seeds at the kids. On off nights, Maggie rolled cigarettes and drank Mississippi Mud.

Ten weeks as a counselor put me in the anti-camp camp. Maybe by probing as many of these places as I can cram into one week I’ll gain insight into why I’m the only one who seems to see camp as punishment rather than reward for a year well-lived.

I leave Three Falls full of taquitos and drive to a nearby camp at the other end of Scouting’s gender spectrum.

At the Girl Scouts’ Camp Tecuya, Kirby Gillispie, director of development and public relations, says girls can’t be girls when boys are around. There is one young man here. He’s the lifeguard. His name is Eddie Herzstock but everyone calls him Shark Bait, after the “Finding Nemo” character. In accordance with the script, whenever campers or counselors speak his name, the surrounding crowd chants, “Shark. Bait. Oooh, ha, ha.” The 8-year-olds dig his dorsal fin hairdo.

Driving again, I sort through the boy-girl stuff that surfaces at camp. At Boys & Girls Club Camp Whittier in Santa Barbara, boys (blue) and girls (pink) can play together as long as they don’t get too close “and make purple,” as the camp saying goes. The warnings don’t concern Ivan, 13, of Santa Maria. I stand gripping my notebook in a chaos of kids around the campfire, so Ivan scoots his buddies over and invites me to sit down. We sing a song that requires me to pull on his thumbs as if milking a cow while chanting, “Moo, moo, moo.”

Later, he points out a row of girls one log over, noting the ones who danced with him at disco night. He studies my face. “Your eyes are like, four different colors, huh?”

Ivan scores an easy friendship, something Maggie and I never achieved.

One time we took off from camp and lighted a campfire at a beach on Long Island Sound. Maggie sipped from her jug. She was tired from the drive and tired of me. Maggie liked camp for the most part, and rebelled against the supervisors by not shaving her armpits. I couldn’t stand camp. Supervisors branded me a rebel for changing the age-old Girl of the Week cheer. “She always does the best in class / By kissing the teacher’s BLANK” became “She always does the best in class / By not sitting on her BLANK.”

I thought my camp was run by off-duty prison matrons. Hidden Villa in Los Altos Hills, west of San Jose, is run, it seems, by hippies. I park near the road and pedal a community bicycle to the main office.

Program director Josh Bennett has periwinkle toenails and a full beard. We cross the organic garden and stop at a pen housing a sow and her pups. Campers fuel the compost pile, he says, then use compost to fertilize plants and feed the plants to the animals.

We walk to the dining hall. A pile of uneaten corn dogs sits on a table, entertaining a fly. I ask if they will be fed to the pigs. Bennett says he hopes not. Corn dogs are part of a different food pyramid, apparently.

I scan a map, call a counselor friend on my cellphone for moral support, get lost on a dirt road in the Stanislaus National Forest and finally, around twilight, pull into the Berkeley-Tuolumne Family Camp where director Jerry Horn confides that kids at Hidden Villa do too much farming, not enough camping.

Here the camp’s staff members fill plywood rickshaws with luggage and tote them to cabins. Small children dart across trails and under volleyball nets. I can see a trickling fork of the Tuolumne River, but what legitimizes the camp, Horn says, is the nature center. There, little Tuolumne Rangers receive wilderness education.

The camp’s been around since 1922. Campers tend to visit annually each year of their lives. I spend the night in Eagle’s Nest II, dodging bats and sliding off a lopsided mattress encrusted with tree sap or maybe bubblegum. Whole families stay here, and for parents the trade-off for discomfort is seeing the kids only at mealtime -- and having a champagne social hour.

Kids and staff at these camps seem to be having fun. Kids at my camp had fun too. Me? I got sick. I phoned home. My dad said maybe I had West Nile virus. I hung up and saw the nurse. She said it wasn’t break time yet. I walked past her and collapsed on a bed. The room had a fan and although I’m an outdoors person through and through, not a bit of my woodsy heart wanted that bed or fan to go away.

Summer camp isn’t really camping, and 70, or even seven solid days of any activity is tough. I remember this as I steer up a winding road in Sierra National Forest.

Jeff Portnoy, camp director at Skylake Yosemite Camp, seems to know that too, and is being lax with Matthew, 9, who has just confessed to a violation of the camp’s no-Game Boy policy. “This place,” says Portnoy, “is somewhere kids can slow down.”

The mantra gains urgency at R.M. Pyles Boys Camp in the Greenhorn Mountain foothills outside Kernville. All staff members here are former campers, and they get the day off while the boys are away on a backpack.

“Here, you don’t have to worry about going outside and taking a bullet,” says Hector “Fader” Jimenez, originally from East Los Angeles. Jimenez, 21, arrived at camp 10 years ago with clenched fists. At the end of the two-week session, he got mad at another camper and was ready to inflict pain. The counselors didn’t intervene. “That’s when I realized,” Jimenez says, “that no one was going to help me change unless I wanted to change myself.”

The Girl Scouts at Tecuya learn survival by spending a night outside the bunk. The Tuolumne Rangers spend 15 minutes alone in the woods. Tonight the boys backpacking at Pyles will bed down for a final night in the back country. In the wilderness. I spend the night a few miles away, in a campground on the banks of the Kern River. I fall asleep to Chilean rock music streaming from the adjoining tent site, the sound of someone’s infant crying and the river rushing across rocks.

Early the next morning, I head for Pali Adventures in the San Bernardino Mountains but get lost in the ‘burbs. There are a lot of things I don’t have: cellphone service, breakfast, gas money, eight hours’ sleep. I swerve into a hardware store parking lot and ask the first red apron for directions. “Where is it you’re trying to go?” he asks. “Summer camp,” I say, suddenly crying.

Pali Adventures offers programs such as Scuba Certification Camp and Secret Agent Camp. Secret Agents learn how to karate chop and shoot paintballs. I meet two agents sent to the hospital after flying off ATVs. They shrug it off. It’s all fun. I get in the car and creep back toward Los Angeles.

Tom Sawyer Camps Inc., based in Altadena, offers low-tech activities like playing in the mud. Water bubbles from pipes on the lawn and flows toward a tree grove where Becky Thatchers are knee-deep in it, slopping together a dam.

Since 1926, the Sawyer philosophy has been to create something from nothing. Camp owners Mike and Sally Horner say parents pay for activities that kids once did for free in their backyards.

In cabins buzzing with voices, the echoes never really fade. At the end of summer, Maggie made plans with the supervisors to return the following year. I avoided them and cleaned the bunks. I found hair ties and bracelets, a paper lily pad I’d used as a bedtime story prop. Exiting parents wagged a finger and ordered me to write to their child, but I was already forgotten. I’d remember the cold lake, the smell of cedar mulch and smoke from the barbecue trapped in my uniform. I wanted to go home.

Even now as I drive the roads that seem to link the whole world into one big, happy summer camp, I wonder why my lack of spirit as a counselor seems so out of step with the norm.

At Lazy “J” Ranch Camp in Malibu, I finally meet two children who say that camp is bad. Iris and Irene, identical twin 11-year-olds from West Covina, clutch tissues and hold back tears as they sit wearing designer jeans in the shade next to a swimming pool filled with squealing kids.

But the twins don’t share my mysterious, uncharacteristic, possibly alien abduction-related camp angst. They just miss their parents and the comforts of air conditioning. I know their kind. By the end of the week their parents will probably have to winch them out of their kayaks.

There are go-to-the-gym people, and go-to-Starbucks people. And there are camp people. They shoot arrows at haystacks. They sing songs about beavers. Moo cow motions beside campfires satisfy a tribal need.

I’m of a different tribe.