BREWSTER — On their last dive of the 2024 season, Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage retrieved an abandoned anchor, a half dozen golf balls, and at least a cooler-full of glass bottles, plastic jugs, and aluminum cans. The group also found several bricks, some lengths of rope, a folding chair, a pair of eclipse glasses, and a sodden Red Sox flag in the depths of Long Pond in Brewster.
“It’s a respectable find for a very, very clean pond,” says Maggie Megaw, 70, who joined the group when she moved to Falmouth last year. She had read about OLAUG in the Falmouth Enterprise.
Being part of this group of women, all over 64, who clean up Cape Cod’s ponds has given Megaw a community of friends who are “strong and funny and irreverent and care about stuff.” The group is “an antidote to one of the things that happens to women as they get older,” she says, “that experience of becoming invisible.”
OLAUG is not invisible. The group’s founder, Susan Baur, says she has been inundated with requests to join dives from would-be members living on the Cape, older men who aren’t allowed to join the group, documentary film students, national talk show hosts, and journalists, among others.
Their triumph in fishing a toilet out of Johns Pond in Mashpee in August even made the front page of the Boston Globe.
“When we dive, it takes a lot of physical energy,” says Mary Grauerholz, 74, adjusting her snorkel before going in. “It takes a little while to get the breathing to settle down.”
Her diving partner, Marci Johnson, was also getting ready. Grauerholz says they complement each other. “I would never dive seven feet, but Marci would,” she says.
“Oh yeah,” says Johnson.
The commitment to fitness is different for each member of the group, but all agree it’s been a positive force as they have aged.
Baur says that immersion in the ponds has helped her accept the aging process and its requisite adaptations. “It was the turtles that helped me, because I was so fascinated how they fit in their world without worrying about being young or old,” says Baur. She has written four books about freshwater turtles. And observing them has kept her swimming.
Baur used to count the trash on the bottom of the ponds in Chatham to mark her progress as she swam across them. Then she decided to start cleaning it up. That was in 2017. OLAUG has grown steadily from there. “In my mid-60s, I set off in the company of turtles to find a new way to be happy,” says Baur, now 84. “Then these guys came along, and they’re doing it, too.”
Baur mapped out routes and sent diving pairs off with a kayak or canoe manned by volunteers from the Brewster Ponds Coalition, supplied with trash bags and fluorescent flotation markers. The women snorkeled around Long Pond for nearly an hour before heading back to shore, where coffee, hot chocolate, and a spread of locally baked pastries awaited them after they sorted the trash.
The group scouts ponds across Cape Cod. Baur says they looked at two in Wellfleet, three in Orleans, and two in Chatham, but all were “too clean.” They came to Long Pond at the invitation of the Brewster Ponds Coalition, which works to preserve the more than 80 kettle ponds in and around that town.
Marty Burke, a Ponds Coalition board member, was there sorting trash. He’s known Baur for about four years, he says, and appreciates OLAUG’s commitment to the ponds. The group first cleaned this pond in 2022 but didn’t come last year. Burke hopes the collaboration will become an annual event.
In the meantime, word of the old ladies transforming Cape Cod, pond by pond, keeps spreading.
“We hope more groups start up in other places,” says OLAUG member Trish Corey. “We all don’t have to do great things. We just have to do small things in great ways.”
