Misc – Page 43 – mathewingram.com/work

Springtime is often one of the best times for a kayak trip down a nice river — the water is usually nice and high, and when you get a warm day it’s lovely with all the spring green and the earth coming alive after a long winter. So this week I decided to take a day and paddle down the Otonabee river, which runs through Young’s Point, about 15 minutes from our house. So I strapped the kayak on the car and had my wife Becky drop me off in town next to the river. I hauled the kayak on my head down a hill and under the bridge (highway 28) where there were a couple of guys fishing, and then I threw it in the water and jumped in off some rocks and off I went.

The Otonabee is quite wide where it flows out of Youngs Point — plenty of room for a yacht like the one in the picture and me. But he was kicking up quite a big wake, so I let him pass and waited for the waves to die down a bit. One of the first things I came across was a little island, which according to Google Maps is called Polly Cow Island (I didn’t take a picture unfortunately).

I found a forum where someone said they did some research and found out that it was named after young indigenous woman who passed away in the early 1800’s. She loved to canoe around the area, this person said, but she caught a fever when she was 16 and the tribe’s medicine men could not save her. So her father placed her body in a birch bark coffin and he and a few others (including one of the Young brothers who settled Young’s Point) towed Polly to the island and dug a grave there under a balsam tree, and every year he would paddle to the island and sit under the tree by her grave.