August 27, 1981

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.)