It’s April 1.  Time to start your search for the perfect summer camp for your kid. Sure, the church, Scout and Y camps we remember from our youth were lots of fun. But there are thousands, if not millions of camps of all types to choose from, and maybe it’s time to find something for your child that goes beyond the typical activities, like learning how to tie a sheepshank, tracking and killing a black bear or doing a covert surveillance/countersurveillance project with all the kids in your sleeper cell.  A quick look around the deep web yields all kinds of options for a fun summer of summer fun.

LITERARY CAMPS

Camp Ernest Hemingway: Run with the bulls.  Feel your heart beating on the pine-needle floor of the forest. Kill the fish not only to keep alive and sell, but for pride. Because you are a fisherman.

Camp James Joyce: Learn to navigate without a compass, using the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit. Eat with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowl—thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes.

Camp Ayn Rand: Ask nothing. Expect nothing. Depend on nothing.

MUSIC CAMPS

Camp Bob Dylan: Step in the middle of seven sad forests. Be out in front of a dozen dead oceans. Start out on Burgundy, but soon hit the harder stuff. Learn to build a fire and shoot it full of holes.

Camp Creedence Clearwater: Clean a lot of plates in Memphis. Pump a lot of ‘tane down in New Orleans. Stop at the log where the catfish bite, walk along the river road at night. Don’t let the man get you, do what he done to me. Cause he’ll get you.

Camp Bob Marley: Fight on arrival. Fight for survival. Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. Get up. Stand up. Stand up for your rights. Don’t shed no tears. No woman. No cry.

THEATRICAL CAMPS

Camp Goodfellas: Make people laugh, like you’re some kind of a clown just here to amuse us. Learn to paint one dog looking one way, one dog looking the other way with a guy in the middle going “whaddya want from me?” Learn how to dig a hole where nobody will find it.

Camp Fight Club: There is no Camp Fight Club.

To learn more about these and other camps, just be patient. We’ll find you. 

Editor’s Note: April Fool!