Artivist Series - Susan Baur
author and founder Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage
Susan Baur is an author and clinical psychologist. She also is founder of Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage. In the latter capacity she leads a group of women aged 64 and up to remove sunken garbage from ponds. Susan founded the organization because she wanted to help the turtles she had come to know from her time swimming in the ponds. the work the group does not only restores the ponds but also enhances the lives of the women who do the work. In return for this physically demanding work the women are rewarded with camaraderie, self-satisfaction, and bakery treats.
Video conversation with Susan … click here
What Susan talks about …
Susan talks about the reason she swims in ponds. It was not a decision she initially liked but did it for safety reasons. At first she was concerned about her encounters with turtles, thinking they were of a dangerous variety. Over time she came to be fascinated by the turtles and they her. Her fascination led her to write several books. Her time in the ponds also made her aware of the garbage on the bottom. Wanting to make the ponds healthier for the turtles, Susan started Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage. She recruits women ages 64 and up to dive in the ponds to collect the garbage. Susan talks about the demands on the volunteers and the rewards of the work.
Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage
Show Notes
00:00:03 Pam Ferris-Olson Today on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast on womenmindthewater.com, I'm speaking with Susan Baur, an author and clinical psychologist. She also is founder of Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage and in that capacity she leads a group of women aged 64 and up to remove garbage from ponds. Susan founded the organization as she wanted to help the turtles she saw while swimming. The group’s work has restored ponds and enhanced the lives of the women who do the work.
00:00:36 Pam Ferris-Olson Susan Baur is the latest guest on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast on womenmindthewater.com. The podcast engages artists in conversation about their work and explores their connection with the water. Through their stories, Wo(men) Mind the Water hopes to inspire and encourage action to protect our planet’s bodies of water and all the creatures that depend on them.
00:01:01 Pam Ferris-Olson It is my pleasure to welcome Susan Baur, an accomplished woman who holds a doctorate in psychology from Boston College and who is the author of a number of psychology and natural history books. One of these is the Turtle Sisters, a series that is an exploration of a pond and the turtles that live in it. Susan founded Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage in order to remove accumulated trash from ponds. In return the women are repaid for this demanding work with camaraderie, self-satisfaction, and bakery treats.
00:01:32 Pam Ferris-Olson Welcome Susan. I’m interested in your decision to swim in ponds. By definition a pond is a small, shallow body of water. I’ve kayaked in many a pond and I have to say that while the wildlife viewing is great, they are not places I’d want to swim. Typically they are clogged with plant matter and compounds that make the water a dark tea color. What led to your decision to swim in ponds? I’m particularly interested since you are reported to have said, that at least initially, you thought the experience was horrible.
00:02:24 Susan Baur You are so right. So what led me to switch from salt water, which I love and is beautiful and clean and often below me are yards and yards of clean, lovely sand and beautiful patterns. Why would I leave that and go to a muddy pond with water lilies, beetles that can sting you, snapping turtles that can grow to 60 lbs.? And the answer is fear for my life. When I was 63 years old many years ago, I moved from sort of the elbow of Cape Cod down toward the open Atlantic, to Chatham.
00:03:07 Susan Baur There is no barrier on the mighty Atlantic Ocean at that point, and so the currents are fearsome. It's supposedly the second most dangerous port in the United States, contiguous United States. And people drown every year. So I thought that is not where I'm going to do distant swimming. I will have to learn to love ponds. I did not really think that was possible for a long time. The mud is the consistency of yogurt. You wade in and you just never know what you're going to find. I was terrified for years.
00:03:51 Pam Ferris-Olson Well, you spent 18 years swimming alone with those turtles, and you've written books based on your experiences. What fascinated you about the ponds?
00:04:08 Susan Baur Well, I started swimming in the ponds. And as I mentioned, I was so anxious and so afraid that I found that I would swim back and forth in the beach area. And then if I felt brave, I would swim to a beer bottle that I'd seen over on one side of the beach. And then if there was a golf ball a couple 100 yards or 70 yards beyond it I could swim there. And I would go back and forth. Finally, I actually added some white rocks and very slowly I should have made these trails around the ponds. I was interested in because I could swim to the rock. I could swim to the can. I could swim to the drowned chair. But I didn't love it. And one day I'd finally gotten up so I could do a whole quarter of a mile turn around and do the quarter of a mile back. And as I was swimming back and I had put my head up to see where the life where the beach was, where the lifeguard stand was. And as I put my head back underwater, because I swim with a mask and snorkel, it's easier on my old neck. As I went back underwater, here were these two small gray, drab turtles about five inches long hanging in the water like little astronauts right in front of my face. And I thought, holy crap, what are these? What are they? What are they doing? So I reached out my hands very tentatively and one of them swam over to one hand. I made it then into a fist and the other one to my horror and delight swam up to my shoulder and just as I was about to scream through my snorkel and smack it off, it went sliding down my arm as if I was a slide in a playground.
00:06:04 Susan Baur And I thought, “what kind of turtles are these?” So I thought, “Well, they're not black and shiny so they can't be those nice little sun turtles or painted turtles.” The only other kind of turtle I knew was snapping turtle. So I jumped to the conclusion that they were snapping turtles and further, that their 60 lb. mother was on her way to rescue her children and was going to bite me and drag me to the bottom and I would drown. So I scattered the turtles and swam as absolutely as fast as I could, all the way back to the beach. And I said, “That's it for pond swimming. No more. At least not in that pond.” But the next day there I was back at that same pond in a kayak paddling along and trying to see them. I thought they were babies. I thought there were babies snapping turtles, and I wanted to see more of them.
00:07:04 Pam Ferris-Olson What aspect of the turtles do you focus on when you write about them.
00:07:10 Susan Baur The relationship, the relationship between me and the turtles. But what I found out very quickly was that I had not seen baby snapping turtles. What I had seen were full grown musk or stinkpot turtles. They have a reputation for being aggressive. And I thought they had a reputation for being playful. So now I knew that there was no great mother that was going to kill me. I went around trying to find these musk turtles. And over the next, I would say, five or six years, I would swim in two or three ponds so often, five times a week maybe, that I got to know where the turtles were and they got to know me. So then I would swim down the length of a pond and as I came back I would go through the different territories. They're very territorial of these different turtles. And one by one, they would come to me and I would think, “Oh, that's Mr. Spot because he has a spot right on his shell. And that's Silver Patches because he's an old turtle and old turtles have a kind of silvery growth on their nose. And so I would name them not to be silly, but just to distinguish them in my mind.
00:08:31 Susan Baur After about five or six years, I decided that I wanted to help my turtles. I could see that more and more people were coming to the pond. More and more dogs were running in and out of the pond. More and more trash was being put in the pond and so I decided I was going to help the ponds. So I went to various towns and I said, “You know, we need some signs here that explain about turtles. Don't let your dog run in the weeds. They can run on the sand. Pick up your dog poop.” A variety of things. And the people looked at me and said, “No. One, it's too political. And, two we don't have time to enforce that. Not going to work.”
00:09:17 Susan Baur So then I decided I would make houses. I would make low cost housing for turtles. And I did that by tying huge branches together and sinking them with concrete blocks because I knew that I always was found turtles under downed branches or downed trees. Someone decided that that was a poor idea and cut them apart and destroyed them. So anything I tried to help turtles, there were a couple of other ideas. Every one of them failed and I am not a person who's used to failure. I love to achieve things. I love to explore things. I love to do things.
But I don't love to fail. So I thought to myself, “Well, the one thing I can do, and no one can stop me, is to take the trash out of the ponds.” And especially when I saw the spent fireworks that were leaking great salts of perchlorate of red and green through the water. I thought, “Well darn it, I can do that.” And so I grabbed a couple of people one day, just while we were swimming.
Flagged over a guy who was in a yellow kayak and said, “Are you doing anything for the next hour?” And he said, “Duh.” And we popped the laundry basket between his legs and went around the pond and collected around, I don’t know, 27 golf balls and a couple of cans and bottles. All my markers that that had served me well but I didn't need anymore.
00:10:48 Susan Baur We thought we were hot stuff with one bushel of trash. Now we collect one to 200 pounds of trash per dive, but back then we thought that was great for three people and so somebody said, “Oh we're a bunch of old ladies against underwater garbage and the name stuck.
00:11:09 Susan Baur Nothing happened for a couple of years and then when the pandemic hit and all your socializing had to be outside anyway, we formed a band of five: one kayaker and four swimmers. And then we really took off.
00:11:23 Pam Ferris-Olson So what kind of stamina and attitude is needed to do the cleanup work?
00:11:28 Susan Baur We need to be real toughies. In other words, for the tryouts every year you have to be able to swim a half a mile in under 30 minutes and then you have to be able to complete that mile. So even at 85, I can swim half a mile very promptly. Freestyle crawl and then with little rests I can still complete the mile in under an hour.
00:11:58 Pam Ferris-Olson You recruit people for this group?
00:12:01 Susan Baur Oh, they recruit us. We have a waiting list of 45 women now waiting to join us. But we're at 30 and we can't take anymore. I just can't organize anymore. I just can’t organize any more than that. We have people in five different states and two different countries who are ready to form chapters. But we've got to figure out the liability. We've got to figure out how to write a manual. How to do a video of the safety training?
00:12:27 Pam Ferris-Olson That's amazing, Susan. I'm really impressed. What do you do with the trash once you collect it?
00:12:34 Susan Baur So we sort it out and if there's some really nice historical stuff, we give it to an historical society of that town. But most of the stuff is so old and so oxidized or rusted that we don't recycle. You know, I suppose we could, but the golf balls are ancient. So we bag it up and we put it aside of the road. Or this year, for the first time, there's a private garbage company who said, “Whenever you have a dive, if you need us to come and get the garbage, we'll just come free and get the garbage.” And of course, we pay them the same way that we get paid, which is in cookies.
00:13:20 Pam Ferris-Olson So let me ask you this. What would you like people to take away from this story?
00:13:28 Susan Baur There are a couple of things. On the surface and, the easiest one to explain is, treat your pond well. It's not an empty bowl of water. It's an entire, beautiful, largely unspoiled ecosystem. Treat it as a treasure. A second very easy thing to explain is keep moving. Life is really much more interesting if you are physically and mentally fit. Keep being fit. Keep moving. Keep reading. The other things that we do, the one other thing, point I'd like to make, is much more difficult. If you take 100 environmental groups and you ask them what motivates you. What I have found from interviewing my interviewers and asking other groups, is that it's a combination of righteousness. It makes us feel good to do the right thing and take the trash out of the pond. Guilt people have put this stuff in, and so people should help get it out. And fear we can see how the ponds are struggling. This pond you can no longer swim in, that pond you can no longer swim in ruining it. We're afraid that they're all going to go away.
00:14:59 Susan Baur Our group, on the other hand, is motivated by joy and that is because when you swim and you are challenged to find the garbage, you are swimming so hard you are so focused on garbage that all the normal concerns in your head disappear. They leave. You are in the flow, in the zone and that makes you happy. People don't understand how happy it is to get out of your own head and sort of get in step with the world. And what motivates us is joy and we come ashore after 60 or 90 minutes, mottled blue with cold. Smiling. Pumping our arms. Pointing to the crazy things that we picked up. Who picked up GI Joe with sunglasses? Oh, that was Jeanine. That was Mary. We come out and the people watching us, the people who have gathered around the pond say, “What are they smoking? What makes them so happy? ‘Cause we want some. That's what. That's our secret sauce. And that's what I discovered swimming with turtles.
00:16:21 Pam Ferris-Olson Well, I hear your passion. I hear your joy and it is indeed inspiring. It makes me want to just get out and swim in the pond. Anyway Susan, I am really grateful for you being on this show. And I want listeners to know that I've been speaking with Susan Bauer, , an author, clinical psychologist, and founder of Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage. In the latter capacity Susan leads women to remove trash that has accumulated in ponds. The group has reclaimed dozens of ponds and created both healthy communities and improved the lives of members of the group.
Susan is the latest guest on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast. The series can be viewed on womenmindthewater.com, Museum on Main Street, and YouTube. An audio-only version and a transcript of this podcast is available on womenmindthewater.com, on iTunes, and Spotify. Wo(men) Mind the Water is grateful to Jaine Rice for the use of her song Women of Water. All rights for the Wo(men) Mind the Water name and logo belong to Pam Ferris-Olson. This is Pam Ferris-Olson.