O, Another Pioneer!

Our fried Colleen argued at a cabin on San Juan Island last weekend that she would have been a pioneer with Ann and Marie. All weekend, she pointed out evidence that she has a pioneer spirit.
I don't actually think that Colleen would have been just a plain ol' pioneer who settled the west, but I do think she would have been on the Lewis and Clark expedition as a scientist.

As Ann, Marie and I sat on the deck, sunning our toes and reading our books, last weekend, Colleen was collecting creatures that I would call jellyfish in a bucket on the dock. Apparently, there were three different phyla in that bucket: lots of tiny jellyfish, a pink jelly-fish eating tianafore (or something like that) and some other creature that floats  translucently in the salt water.

The giant, the tianafore, was a little smaller than the palm of my hand, but it was voracious. In its hour in our bucket, it ate two of its bucket-mates. You could tell because you could see them inside its translucent self.

Colleen was delighed about all of this activity. She ran to the water to collect them, gave the drunken sailors on the dock a high school biology lesson, and clapped her hands as she showed us the tianafore's voracity. After an hour, she reluctuantly returned the sea creatures to the bay, but that night she planned to take some back to her ninth grade classroom. "They'll love this," she clapped and grinned.

Colleen definitely has the enthusiasm needed for Jefferson's expectations of Lewis and Clark, and I know they let girls go because of Sacajawea, so I think she would have been on that expedition: not a pioneerso much as an expeditor.

I know Lewis and Clark would have appreciated her keen powers of observation and enthusiastic spirit. I suspect she would have figured out how they could make ice-cream on the journey. She'd be famous, for sure. As it is, I'm glad she's my friend.