Crab Campaign: An Invasive Species Tracker's Journal
Science Squad
Prediction Boring Summer This summer is going to be so boring I’m sure of it I probably won’t even bother to write in this journal much since I’m going to be stuck here in Maryland when I could be packing my bags for China And to think I had such high hopes How naïve I was It all started yesterday when Mom Dad and I were eating at House of Noodles to celebrate the end of the school year and the A for my report on the Terra Cotta Warriors Side note I may be a B student but it would have been pretty pathetic if I didn’t get an A on my report I mean a whole army of life-size clay soldiers buried with an emperor That’s wicked cool Anyway back to why this summer is going to be so awful You know how fortune cookies say dumb things like Your only way to have a friend is to be one Things that aren’t even predictions more like observations The one I got at House of Noodles yesterday was definitely
true and an actual prediction It had to be It said You will step on the soil of many countries All semester I’ve been wanting to go to China and see those Terra Cotta Warriors And now to get that fortune while out celebrating my hard work it had to be a sign Right Wrong When I told my parents why I was so excited about my fortune they were amazed and not in a good way They didn’t buy into the idea at all that a little piece of paper was a sure sign I was going to China at least not anytime soon What did they need it to say Hello Ned Bolling you will step on the soil of many countries Instead they had all kinds of practical questions like how would I pay for it and what about my responsibilities at home and with the Science Squad Okay so it’s true that I’m the new leader of the Eastern Shore Science Squad Maggie was supposed to be but her family had to move to Boston for her dad’s job My plans to travel the world and be the leader of the Eastern Shore Science Squad cancel each other out If I’m not going to China this summer all I want to do is swing in the hammock on our porch and read the books that I lugged home from the library on the SCIENCE SQUAD
Terra-Cotta Warriors The thing I’m most interested in is their weapons They had the coolest arrowheads Here’s the crazy part Those arrowheads which archaeologists think are from the third century BCE look a lot like the ones I collect around here which are even older Paleo-Indians were the first Marylanders Archaeologists say they migrated to North America more than 10,000 years ago to hunt mammoth bison and caribou I never really thought about where they were migrating from so I looked it up Get this These people who were of Asian descent crossed the land bridge into the Alaska-Canada area of North America Okay so maybe they weren’t from China exactly but still I like to discover connections between things that when you first look at them don’t seem connected at all like arrowheads from two different continents My parents call this daydreaming Dad says it’s what keeps me from being productive which translates to he thinks I don’t help out enough on our farm Dad inherited our farm from his dad who inherited it from his dad It’s a small farm but it’s still a lot of work which my dad points out to me just about every day Even though he hires workers to help plant and harvest the crops he Crab Campaign
