What ever happened to pails and shovels?

The joke’s on me. In the 1990s I wrote an April Fools’ Day column about outsized, outrageous and off-the-charts summer camp programs for kids.

I wrote: “Charles, a high school student I know, is going to Neurosurgery Camp this summer. I suppose that’s so when other parents say their kids’ summer program isn’t exactly ‘brain surgery,’ Charles’s parents can trump them big time.”
I wrote of “super interns” who would live at the White House, take one meal a day with the president and have desks in the Oval Office. Of course, back then I didn’t realize the potential risk of sending young interns into Bill Clinton’s White House.

Another “program” I invented was “High Steel Camp,” at which kids would be trained to do repairs on the World Trade Center. Sad to think about that now, isn’t it?

So even though I tried to conjure up the most ridiculous summer programs imaginable, I recently came across a few 2011 summer camp programs — real programs — that are equally bizarre and extreme. I wonder why parents would send a 7-year-old to a sleep-away “spy camp,” for example. What’s wrong with swimming and badminton? Why sign up a 10-year-old for culinary camp when s’mores have delighted children for decades?

Of course, the appetite for the extreme experience is the parents’. They make the decisions for kids to go to places like Camp Winnarainbow in California, a circus camp where 7- to 14-year-olds can “walk on stilts or fly through the air with the greatest of ease.”

In spy camp in Pennsylvania, campers learn “stealth and surveillance techniques, code breaking, survival training and undercover maneuvers.” The literature says the highlight of the summer “mission” is to find the “mole.” This camp accepts second-graders. Question: Is waterboarding allowed? Do cyanide pills come with the PB&J sandwiches? What happens to the mole once he or she is revealed?