Meet The Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage
Got pond garbage? These ladies will travel.
And not only will the Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage travel, but they will also swim, dive and declutter, delving into the murky depths with masks, goggles, gloves, and flippers. But do not let their name fool you—these self-proclaimed “old ladies” have a whole lot of life left in them.
Susan Baur is the 81-year-old founder of the group and author of a series of children’s books called “Turtle Sisters.” She has been swimming in Cape Cod ponds for decades. When she moved to Chatham about 20 years ago, she opted for freshwater bodies as opposed to open oceans and beaches. The more she swam over the years, the more she noticed the growing issue of pond garbage all over Cape Cod.
“I found that it was very helpful to have trash on the bottom of the pond floor because I would make these maps in my head: swim to the beer bottle, and then to the golf ball,” Ms. Baur said. “And if you get around this corner, you’ll get to the lawn chair. But after four or five years, I thought ‘you know, I’ve got too many markers here. The markers kept adding, kept dropping into the pond.”
One day, Ms. Baur decided that enough was enough, so she grabbed three swimmer friends, a kayak, a laundry basket to collect the trash, and a bungee cord to strap it down. And thus, the Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage, or OLAUG, was born.
There was, however, still a lot of learning to be done.
“We learned that it takes a long time to do a pond,” Ms. Baur said. “It takes a full hour and a half for a good-sized pond or at least an hour. We were amazed by how much stuff we pulled out, from big pieces of plywood to endless numbers of golf balls. And in certain ponds, you get the beer can. And you know exactly who drinks beer and what kind of beer they drink around that pond.”
After some practice, Ms. Baur really got the routine down to a science, including wetsuits for warmth, gloves for protection, and flippers for diving. After about two years, she joined the Falmouth Water Stewards and joined up with other like-minded ladies who shared her passion for environmentalism and water preservation. New members started to join her for swims, and things really took off from there.
“It’s sort of evolved,” she said. “Now, we have a couple of really great new members who are enthusiastic and available. About two years ago, we started doing a couple of ponds, sort of because the Falmouth Water Stewards were interested and the story would go in their newsletter, but we’re not affiliated with anybody and we don’t want to be. There’s a liability in that sort of thing. But once we got a bit of popularity, all of the sudden everybody wanted to join.”
The Birth Of A Movement
Current members of the OLAUG group include Ms. Baur, Mary Grauerholz, Diane Hammer, Helen Mangelsdorf, and Robin Melavalin. The ladies range in age from 64 to 81 years and all consider Falmouth and greater Cape Cod their home, which is why they have undertaken the task of cleaning up its ponds. But the task is not as much for the benefit of those above land: for the ladies, it is about preserving the waterscape hidden beneath the surface.
“We’re really not doing this so people’s home values go up or that it will look like a Hollywood set of a New England pond,” Ms. Baur said. “It’s for the creatures under the water, the plants, the fish. I mean, we know certain fish by name. There are certain fish that have had chunks taken out of their jaw because of a hook being caught in there, or other ones with an infection or something. And they will hang out and swim very near to us.”
All of the women are divers—barring Ms. Hammer, who says she is not much of a swimmer but enjoys her post as the garbage collector in the kayak—and have seen the bottom of enough ponds on Cape Cod to know that the problem, which is entirely human-driven, is out of control and only getting worse. They have found lawn chairs, beer cans, fishing lures, liquor bottles, golf balls, clothing, cellphones, three car tires, a spent box of fireworks actively leaking perchlorate, and what seems like hundreds of nip bottles.
“This is something that Tom Hanks talks about in that movie where he said, ‘Life is like a box of chocolates,’” Ms. Hammer said. “Well, so is garbage. You never know what you’re going to get.”
Not knowing what they are going to find is half the fun for these ladies, though. They have said that a huge part of what keeps their group going is thinking of each new pond as an adventure, and they are hoping that others will subscribe to the same point of view: that a community service activity such as this one can be really fun as well as really impactful.
“Turn the job into an adventure,” Ms. Baur said. “Every single pond is different; every single venture even into the same pond is different. You never know what you’re going to find and we end up in gales of laughter or oohs-and-ahhs of consternation. If you could make every good pond practice as much fun, as adventurous, funny, and happy as ours is, we’d have the cleanest ponds in New England.”
Going Beyond Garbage
Despite being what they are known for, removing pond garbage is just the tip of the iceberg for OLAUG. Since all of the members are ecologically minded and involved in other environmental efforts around town, they have begun working to expand their vision to incorporate other aspects of waterscape preservation.
Ms. Mangelsdorf is the resident horticulturist of the group, having received her certification in the field from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia after wrapping up her career teaching art. Plants, water, and art make up the intersection of Ms. Mangelsdorf’s interests and reasons for joining the group.
“I feel like the environment, especially water, is our number-one issue, period,” Ms. Mangelsdorf said. “That it’s crucial, actually. That’s my angle: it always seems that the water is the most important thing… I’m very interested in plants [and] very interested in learning what kind of plants are [in the ponds]. I don’t even really know the native plants here that well because I was only here when I was a kid. So now I’m looking at it all and knowing that 90 percent of the growth on our property in West Falmouth is invasive species.”
The concern that Ms. Mangelsdorf shares with her fellow OLAUGs is that the invasive species are invading the waterscapes as well as the landscapes of Cape Cod. Ms. Baur said that the goal is for Ms. Mangelsdorf to be able to identify and inventory the many different species of plants they see underwater, as well as to start a log of where they find certain larger trash items that can not be immediately removed and will need to be revisited later. In doing this, the group will be able to track progress easier and identify problem areas quicker and more efficiently.
“I’d say there’s a real strong dedication [to the environment],” Ms. Grauerholz said. “I feel like we’re really bringing in a lot of people, we’re getting [new] voices from people who really do have scientific experience. I find it just amazing. I think that a connection that we all have is water environmentalism.”
A big part of OLAUG’s message is that water environmentalism really begins on the shore, with disposing of garbage properly, with being careful and thoughtful when entering into a pond that is considered home to hundreds of species that the average person would not even know are there.
“What I want to say is that under the water, [just] because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t make a difference,” Ms. Hammer said. “We’ve got to keep the trash in the boats and not throw it in the water. You need to inspire everyone not to put trash in the ponds or along the road or the beach. There are 996 ponds [on Cape Cod]. I looked it up. That’s why five people… can’t clean them all; we need other people to help. And cookies are a definite help.”
Clean Ponds For Cookies
Some people work for money, some work for fame, but the Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage? They work for cookies.
It started with Ms. Baur and her two-cookie rating system that she used to gauge her swims and, soon enough, her garbage collecting.
“It depends on how much trash you get,” she said. “So I used to swim around—and I still do it, because I’ve got this thing about ginger cookies—and I would say, ‘oh, that’s a one-cookie swim.’ Or ‘man, I got around 1.1 miles in 45 minutes? That is a two-cookie swim!’”
The ladies take their cookies so seriously that Ms. Melavalin actually had some in her bag during the interview conducted at the Enterprises’ office. She shared them with the group,and they laughed and shared anecdotes while they snacked.
“We have a lot of laughs,” Ms. Grauerholz said. “It’s a blast.”
The camaraderie between the ladies is impossible to ignore and clearly, they love what they do. Over the past few years, something as innocent as picking up garbage from the bottom of a pond while swimming with friends morphed into something that not only had legs of its own but also an environmentally conscious group of women—or as Ms. Baur says, “pond warriors,”—behind it. And as they expand, the goal is to develop a more comprehensive program for pond preservation that goes beyond just their group and reaches the larger Cape Cod community.
“It always starts with a gathering of ordinary people committed to doing some extraordinary things,” Ms. Hammer said. “And that’s really what this is about and that’s where I think we come together and we say we’re going to make a difference here. We’re going to make a difference one piece of trash at a time.”
The ladies have said they are open to swimming in any pond on Cape Cod, as long as it is safe to do so. In 2021, the group completed two full pond cleanups and a number of casual cleanups. They are aiming to do four ponds in the coming year and while that number may seem small, the ladies say it is crucial to remember that there is a lot more to a pond than what you see on the surface, and there is a lot of land underneath the water.
“There’s this whole underwater experience that happens when we look at a pond,” Ms. Melavalin said.
“It’s stunningly beautiful, it’s this huge body of water, it’s dark underneath, and what we see is a reflection of the sky. But what’s underneath that reflection is this whole water world with all of these animals going about their lives, with plants living there; [some that] belong and some that are invasive… We’re looking for things that don’t belong. It is like a treasure hunt, and I do think that we see differently. Everything looks so interesting under the water. Part of it for me, with this thing about going into the ponds and taking out the trash, is because the things don’t belong there.”
While a big part of their message is that if they can do it, anyone can, the ladies also exercise extreme caution in their garbage extraction processes. OLAUG’s practices have greatly been informed by decades of interest in science, environment, and waterscapes, so they are somewhat of the local experts when it comes to pond garbage. They advise against trudging into any pond and removing all visible detritus, often because things like fallen logs and broken branches actually serve as habitat, and removing it would do more harm than good to the critters that reside there.
“If you want to see the natural world in its natural state on Cape Cod, there is no place you can go except underwater,” Ms. Baur said. “Because every bit—whether it’s Beebee Woods or Nickerson State Forest or whatever—it’s been logged, it’s been farmed, it’s got trails, mountain bike trails all over it. Not the underside of a pond.”
Ms. Baur said that for her, Cape Cod’s ponds are a sanctuary, a place of contemplation, something spiritual: ponds are her church.
“But if we took the litter we got from one pond and we put it in a church, you would have people picking up that trash pronto,” she said. “And for me, ponds and underwater are my happy places. I’ve been doing this for 18 years. Let’s get the trash out of the church.”
For the Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage, getting garbage out of the pond is only half the problem; it needs to be kept out of the water in the first place, and that is a battle that takes place on dry land.
“The most important thing is prevention,” Ms. Melavalin said. “Everyone can prevent things from going in the water; it’s our responsibility as humans not to contaminate these natural places.”
“And then,” Ms. Hammer said, “have a cookie.”
Anyone interested in learning more about OLAUG or potentially starting their own chapter are encouraged to email Ms. Baur at OLAUG.MA@gmail.com