Snakes in the lake, and that's just for starters

If you’ve shelled out many thousands of dollars for sleep-away camp, you may not want to read any further.

We recently had a memory fest with our grown children, during which way too much information was shared about their teenage years. They both have kids of their own now and feel inoculated somehow against our sound and fury. To them it really does signify nothing.

We were sitting around the table. Someone mentioned sleep-away camp and how much it costs today, and my husband mentioned that sending both kids away put a real dent in our family budget in the ’80s.

But that wasn’t all we spent. We spent hours interviewing camp owners and visiting prospective places. In those days there were no camp websites or Internet searches. So we relied on word of mouth and our own good sense, which, apparently, was in short supply.

Our son says we sent him to the wrong camp. We had carefully weeded out the super-sports camps and chosen a place with a reputation for a varied selection of activities, without the competitive atmosphere. We did this because our son didn’t particularly enjoy baseball or soccer or tennis. Now, he says, he always loved sports and the camp was a dud. It is clear that we had no insight into what our own child enjoyed. It’s clear that we had no clue who he was. OK.

Our daughter doesn’t let us off with just being clueless. She says she hated every day of sleep-away. She tells us that she was so homesick she cried every day and couldn’t eat. She says they put her at a separate table so as not to upset the other campers. Those were her good days. She also was traumatized by the infestation of long black snakes in the lake where they swam. She says the counselors would pull snakes out with a hook, chop them up on the waterfront deck and then yell, “OK, everybody in!” Should I believe this?

Further, she claims that her counselors were dysfunctional foreigners who barely spoke English and spent the evenings smoking pot outside the cabin.