What was going on when I was born?

THEY arrived in private railway cars, sped through the woods in covered surreys and cruised across lakes in mahogany boats before reaching their summer places in the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York. They called their one-or two-thousand-acre estates ''camps'' in the same spirit that they called their marble palaces in Newport, R.I., ''cottages.'' ''Of everything I have experienced in America, this is probably the strangest,'' wrote Sigmund Freud, who, on a trip to the camps at the turn of the century, was struck by their incongruous luxury in the wilderness. The camps were also given modest names, like Camp Pine Knot, owned by Collis P. Huntington (''Unquestionably the most picturesque and recherche affair of its kind in the wilderness,'' according to an 1881 guidebook); J.P. Morgan's Camp Uncas, which has a fieldstone fireplace as big as some Manhattan apartments, and Francis P. Garvan's Kamp Kill Kare, the oddest of names for the most stylish of the camps, which are now called ''grand camps.'' At Uncas, for example, Mr. Morgan's cuisine was French, but perhaps to remind guests that they were roughing it, the butter plates were made of birch bark. Anthony N.B. Garvan, grandson of the builder, recalling summers at his family's camp, said, ''To have such a camp at the end of a six-and-a-half-mile dirt road - it was like Delmonico's on the frontier.''

''We can't decide for the Palestinians behind their backs - President Anwar el-Sadat. (A13:1.)

New York City must provide clean and safe shelter to every homeless man who seeks it, according to an agreement signed in State Supreme Court yesterday by city and state officials and a lawyer for six homeless men who sued for that commitment nearly two years ago. The agreement also sets standards to prohibit overcrowding at the city's expanded shelter on Wards Island, a large shelter in the Catskills and at various Bowery hotels where the men are now sent after processing at the Men's Shelter on the Bowery. But the agreement does not force the city to open community shelters to house the city's tens of thousands of street people, something the plaintiffs sought and Mayor Koch has strongly opposed. Where the men are sheltered is left to the city's discretion.

President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel agreed today to renew the long-stalled talks on self-rule for the Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank of the Jordan and the Gaza Strip. The decision to revive the moribund talks on Sept. 23 was the major announcment made by the two leaders at a news conference held after they ended a two-day meeting. It was their 12th such meeting during the four years that they have had private consultations. But the conclusion of the latest talks, held in this ancient city on the Mediterranean Sea, did not chart a major new direction in the search for a comprehensive Middle East peace.

California's $14.5 billion agriculture industry suffered two severe blows today: Japan decided to require fumigation of produce that it imports from California, and it was confirmed that the infestation of the Mediterranean fruit fly had vaulted 280 miles south, to Los Angeles County. The decision by the Japanese to require fumigation of fruits and vegetables that might act as a host to the crop-destroying fly modified an earlier temporary agreement to require fumigation only of those crops from the area placed under Federal quarantine in an effort to keep the pest from spreading. That area covered three counties and parts of two others in the South San Francisco Bay area, places where little commercial produce was grown. Japan's latest position was presented to American officials after meetings that illustrated the huge difference in how the nations perceive the fruit fly problem. (Page A22.)

-------------------------------------------------------------------- Phyllis Theroux is the author of ''Peripheral Visions,'' to be published in January by William R. Morrow. By PHYLLIS THEROUX THE other day my youngest son and I had a talk about responsibility. He had lost his summer-school homework assignment on his newspaper route. I told him he had to go back and find it. He said he would not. I said that if he did not finish his homework he would have to go to bed early. He then said that school was dumb and proceeded - with lots of fists in the air and thrashing around on the sofa cushions - to denounce the entire structure of society as he knows it.

New York City officials yesterday suddenly shut down a disintegrating sanitation terminal on the Hudson River at which 250 trucks a day had dumped garbage into barges. Norman Steisel, the Sanitation Commissioner, said that he had known for some time about the terminal's general deterioration, but that he had no evidence the situation was dangerous and therefore had not instructed engineers to inspect it until recently. The inspection took place in connection with plans for the Westway highway project, which would pass near the station. The terminal, built in 1950, is at the western end of Gansevoort Street, three blocks south of 14th Street. The city's eight other marine transfer stations are now being rapidly inspected, Mr. Steisel said. If the other buildings, most of which are also deteriorating, reveal dangers requiring any to be closed, ''we're in for a real problem'' in disposing the city's garbage, Mr. Steisel said.

A malfunction of the camera platform partly crippled Voyager 2 early this morning when the spacecraft was behind Saturn, out of communication with Earth. The malfunction occurred while Voyager was pulling away after its closest approach to the planet. Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory here analyzed data to find what happened and when, and if there was any way to get the platform back in working order. The problem, a stuck swivel that moves the platform from side to side to aim it, affected three scientific sensors as well as the two television cameras.

Convicted by the Government in May and condemned by peers on the Senate Ethics Committee on Monday, Senator Harrison A. Williams Jr. cast a wary eye on a visitor today and preempted the inevitable questions about Abscam. ''What do you know about this whole Abscam business and me?'' he asked, as if a final enormous jury remained in his travail and he intended to poll it, one listener at a time. ''Just what I read in the papers,'' the visitor replied as the Senator leafed through a file of documents, preparing and rearranging his case. Outside his office, the halls of Congress remained eerily quiet with the absence of all the rhetoric and hustle of vacationing lawmakers who were safely back home, protecting their futures.

Four prominent Democratic officials have sharply criticized Mayor Koch's alliance with the Republican Party because they say it is improving the chances for Republican victories in next year's elections for Governor and the Legislature. Even the Republican state chairman said that while Governor Carey's political setbacks and President Reagan's political strength were probably more important, Mr. Koch's efforts to win the Republican as well as the Democratic endorsement in his campaign for re-election this year ''might be helpful for the future.'' ''I think he's letting us down in his role as a Democratic Party leader,'' said Carol Bellamy, the President of the City Council. Similiar views were expressed in separate interviews by Lieut. Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, Assembly Speaker Stanley Fink of Brooklyn and the State Senate minority leader, Manfred Ohrenstein of Manhattan.

-------------------------------------------------------------------- Carol Wheeler is a freelance writer. By CAROL WHEELER IN a city like New York, space is the great luxury. Almost everyone has trouble finding as much room to spread out as he would like. As a result, architects and their clients have become increasingly ingenious at finding space where none seems to exist. Cellar storage rooms, dark basements, even the extra spaces between existing floors are some of the places where useful urban living spaces are being created. James Stewart Polshek & Partners are responsible for some remarkable found space in the East 70's, in the lower two floors of a town house originally designed by H. H. Richardson. ''The client wanted a study,'' Mr. Polshek said, ''and since the house had a very deep extension and 15-foot ceilings, I found I could form a new internal stair system in its center, going from the first floor to the roof of the second floor, without destroying the soaring ceiling heights in front or back.''

The airline industry, flying 75 percent of its normal schedule and hauling about 80 percent of its expected passengers, is beginning to feel a painful financial pinch from the 22-day slow down in air traffic. Immediately after the walkout, many industry analysts said the slow down would be good for the industry's long-term health because it would force reluctant carriers to trim fat by cutting unprofitable routes and by grounding inefficient aircraft. That optimism assumed that passengers would return to the skies fairly quickly, airline executives say. But doubts about safety, added to the effects of a soft economy, have kept large numbers of passengers away from the terminals, producing grim near-term propsects for several carriers.