A Senior Moment

The pond is silent, until the first cry: “Found something!” A swimmer ducks into the water. She emerges, fist first, clutching a pair of bright blue children’s swimming goggles. These are passed to a kayaker, who waggles them overhead, like a prize, before stowing them in a laundry basket for safekeeping. 

Over the next hour, on a cloudy Saturday morning in July, the team of 15—all over age 65, all women—hunts for trash across Mares Pond, a 28-acre ­kettle hole on Cape Cod, at depths of up to eight feet.

The divers turn up wooden planks, silty beer cans, a plastic container lid, a mud-caked fishing rod, a cement block and countless other bits of garbage. The day’s pièce de résistance, though, is a 12-foot segment of aluminum flashing. It requires the combined efforts of several divers to hoist it onto the back of a kayak.

When the team returns to shore, the women are smiling and laughing, cracking jokes about the dive and their haul.

“We didn’t even know what it was,” one swimmer said with a giggle, refere-ncing the blueberry cheesecake–flavoured electronic cigarette they found. “We have to ask a young person.”

These are the Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage (OLAUG). Since 2017, the group, which accepts only older women as members, has made it its mission to remove trash from ponds across Cape Cod.

Part conservation organization, part social club, the group’s existence is owed to a moment of spontaneity by Susan Baur, a retired psychologist. A lifelong nature buff, she had begun swimming in ponds on the cape as a safer alternative to the ocean. However, between mud, darkness and snapping turtles, the world of the pond was at first one of anxiety for her. The only way she could keep her courage up was to rely on markers.

“I’d swim to the golf ball, and then swim to the drowned tree, and then swim to the beer can,” she says. “I love beer cans; they’re easy to spot.”

Eventually, Baur realized she didn’t need the markers anymore—and that they were multiplying. In 2017, on a whim, she rounded up two friends and approached a stranger with a kayak, and together they cleared “half a bushel” of litter from a pond.

Soon others joined the crusade, and, like Baur, they found a sense of wonder in the pond cleanups. “It’s a different world under the surface,” says Robin Melavalin. “You see fish of all different sizes. You see turtles. It’s beautiful. It’s all underwater miracles.”

While many outsiders have ex­pressed their gratitude to OLAUG for cleaning up the ponds, a number have questioned why they refer to themselves as ‘old ladies’.

“You should call yourselves the Lovely Ladies Against Underwater Garbage, or the Mermaids Against Glitter Litter,” Baur, smirking, recalls being told. Others have said she should open the group to all ages, and to men.

Although she admits that it wasn’t initially a conscious choice, she now believes that the ‘old lady’ identity is a crucial part of what the group is about.

“Over 65, if you’re healthy enough to do what we’re doing, it is the age of gratitude,” Baur says. “You are so grateful that you can still do this. You’re just grateful anyway, grateful for the trees and grateful for clean water.”

She notes that “women over 65 tend to feel the constriction of ageing.” They lose power and social standing, she says. Part of the goal of OLAUG is to demonstrate that older women, working as a team, can do a lot more than people might think.

Criticism aside, the most common response is “I want to join you.” And after that first dive, the new recruits’ excitement is infectious.

“They have just swum farther than they’ve ever swum. They’ve lifted more than they’ve ever lifted. They’ve seen stuff that they’ve never seen. And they’ve done good,” says Bauer. “They come back with their hearts beating.”

From The Christian Science Monitor. © 2023 Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved. Used under license.