My Watermark is Lake Kashagawigamog in Ontario.

It’s important to me because it’s a lake that I grew up on. My parents moved there when I was one years old.

They used to live in Toronto, then they moved up north to be closer to my father's parents. So they bought this little cottage and renovated it and made it year round. So i grew up on the lake, so it’s been home for as long as I can remember.

So when I was really little there was this massive legend around the lake. I don’t know if it was real or if it was fake. I just remember as a child we heard that there was a really rich man who lived on the lake, and he decided to buy a pet alligator.

Once he decided that he no longer wanted the alligator, he apparently decided to release it into the water. So for the weeks after we would be running around the shoreline thinking that logs by the shore was an alligator, or it could have been my dad telling me stories.

But regardless we ran for hours along the shoreline looking for a pet alligator that was loose in our lake. But that never stopped me from going in the lake. We had this little raft tied to the end of our dock and we would swim out to the raft.

Another weird animal story would have to be that there is jellyfish in the lake. They’re these little fresh water jellyfish, about the size of a loonie or toonie. So as kids we would be jumping off the raft into pools of these little jellyfish.