The season for kids’ summer camps has arrived. Now if only summer itself would arrive, things would be near perfect.

When I was a kid, summer camp pretty much meant being driven somewhere far out of town and left on your own to survive in the wilderness. At least that’s how I perceived it.

Never mind the running water, electricity and ample food. It was still the wilderness: just me, a hundred other kids, a few counselors – and more mosquitoes than grains of sand in the Sahara Desert.

It was a Boy Scout camp, where we learned to do things like tying knots, gathering firewood, using a compass – and trying to stay awake. I didn’t go far in the Scouts. I think I earned a Second Class badge, which only requires that a Scout have a pulse.

The Scout camp was located on the shores of a large lake – so swimming was supposed to be the big, fun activity. But the water was so penetratingly cold, the lake was more suited to ice-skating than swimming – and everyone dreaded sticking a toe in, much less the rest of the body.

One time, after the counselors had mercifully directed everyone to come out of the water, they did a head count and noticed that someone was missing. Ironically, it was a kid named Bob.

After searching the entire camp area for him, the counselors nervously announced that they would begin “dragging the lake” for Bob in a rowboat. I wasn’t sure what “dragging the lake,” meant, but it sounded serious.

For most of two hours, my fellow campers and I stood on shore – anxiously watching the boat in its grim, silent task. Then someone behind our group shouted, “Hey, what’s going on in the lake?” It was Bob, grinning awfully wide for a corpse. He’d decided to go on a little day hike without telling anyone.

Rumor had it that Bob was soon on his way home, although no one knew for sure. We never saw him again that summer – or the next. What a drag.

Every night, the routine was to sit around a big campfire while the counselors would take turns telling jokes. One counselor – a guy named Roy – told pun jokes (“What does an Eskimo get from sitting on the ice too long? Polaroids”) or, (“What happened to the survivors when a red ship collided with a blue ship? They were marooned”). After about 10 minutes of that stuff, we all wanted to get into the big campfire.

Another counselor named Phil took to telling ghost stories. But he was scarier than any of his stories, with a patch over one eye, wild hair and oversized canine teeth. He looked like he could easily eat three of us and still have room for another. Maybe that’s what happened to Bob.

My kids used to love summer camp – and my son would likely still be going if not for the fact that he’s now married and it would seem kind of creepy.

When he was little, we would drive him from our home on the Eastside, across the bridge to a downtown Seattle school parking lot, where he would get on the bus for his long ride to summer camp. His belief was that camp was perhaps hundreds of miles from home. In fact, it was less than a 1/2 mile.

We kept the secret for years, figuring that if he ever knew how close he was, he’d try to walk home for snacks and TV.

One thing there was never any risk of – was him walking home to do laundry. One summer, when my wife opened his duffle bag after a week away, the smell would have offended a skunk.

So everything in the bag went either straight into the washing machine – or to the backyard, where it was doused in gasoline and set ablaze.

Then as the fire began to die down, we’d stand over it and roast marshmallows.

We just roasted them.

We didn’t dare eat them.