Trash Talk: Older Women Cleaning Up Cape Cod

⏱️ 9 min read           

Hi everyone, and welcome to my podcast, That’s Life, I Swear. I’m your host, Rick Barron

Somewhere at the bottom of a Cape Cod pond, a rusty anchor and a soggy lounge chair are about to have a very bad day — because a group of grandmothers in wetsuits and swim caps, none of them a minute under 65, is coming down to get them.

Yes, these ladies are taking out the trash to clean up Cape Cod. They are known as the Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage. Over time, they estimate they’ve removed 6,000 pounds of trash from ponds on Cape Cod. 

Welcome to That's Life, I Swear. This podcast is about life's happenings in this world that conjure up such words as intriguing, frightening, life-changing, inspiring, and more. I'm Rick Barron your host. 

That said, here's the rest of this story  

Lovells Pond, in Barnstable, looked like a postcard: glassy water, a lazy blue sky, the kind of scene that belongs on a real estate brochure. But a small army of women bobbing at its edge knew better. They'd scouted this pond weeks earlier and knew exactly what was hiding beneath that pretty surface — a junkyard's worth of beer cans, cracked golf balls, cinder blocks, and more. Somewhere down there, presumably, is also a decent percentage of everyone's missing sunglasses.

These are the Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage, and they do not mess around. Before anyone gets in the water, there's a swim test, a free-dive requirement to eight feet, and an age minimum of 64 — this is a retirement plan with a snorkel attached, and possibly the only club in America where turning 65 is a prerequisite rather than a punchline. 

Once certified, members suit up in life jackets, kayaks, wetsuits and masks, and go to war with whatever decades of litterbugs have dumped into the Cape's ponds. There is no hazing ritual, unless you count the swim test, which frankly sounds harder than most.

The results, on the day of the Lovells Pond dive, were spectacular in the most delightfully disgusting way. Within an hour, kayaks were stuffed to the top edge of the hull of the boat: a fishing pole, a chunk of asphalt, a rusty anchor, a slimy two-by-four, a disintegrating tire, and — this being New England — an alarming quantity of beer cans and wine bottles. 

"The drinking is getting obscene around here," one diver cracked, hauling up yet another can, sounding less like an environmentalist and more like a scandalized aunt at a family reunion.

The whole operation runs with more precision than most Fortune 500 board meetings. A "beach boss" works a clipboard and a map like a five-star general plotting a beach landing, except the enemy here is a soggy lawn chair rather than an opposing army. 

Divers are split into teams. The pond gets scouted in advance, algae levels get tested, sunblock gets reapplied liberally, and everyone knows exactly where they're supposed to be and when. 

It's part military operation, part synchronized swimming routine, part very determined yard sale in reverse — instead of hauling junk out of an attic to sell, they're hauling it out of a pond to throw away and getting a full workout in the process.

The group's founder, Susan Baur, an 86-year-old retired psychologist, started the whole enterprise back in 2018 after years of quietly fishing junk out of ponds on her own swims, one waterlogged relic at a time. Word spread. Friends joined. 

A viral photo of the crew rescuing a toilet from a watery grave sent them briefly, gloriously, semi-famous — television crews showed up, camera crews slipping on pond mud in their dress shoes, and even a daytime talk show chipped in a $10,000 donation. 

Today the group has roughly 30 members, a waiting list, and, reportedly, applicants willing to beg their way in. Nobody begs their way into garbage duty for no good reason; clearly something magical, or at least something extremely fun, is happening out there.

By now, the Old Ladies estimate they've hauled some 6,000 pounds of trash out of Cape Cod's ponds — enough scrap metal and broken furniture, one imagines, to open an antique shop. 

The Lovells Pond haul alone, an estimated 1,000 pounds, was their biggest single catch yet, carried up the shoreline piece by grimy piece, trailerful by trailerful, to a waiting truck bound for the dump. 

Watching thirty women in their sixties, seventies, and eighties cart a waterlogged tire up a hill is, by all accounts, both a genuinely impressive physical feat and one of the more surreal sights Cape Cod has to offer on a given Tuesday.

But ask the members why they really do it, and the answer isn't really about the trash at all. It's about what happens to a person's sense of self once the world starts treating her as fragile, and she decides, kayak paddle in hand, to disagree loudly and repeatedly. 

Several members describe the group as a lifeline after retirement, divorce, widowhood, or illness — a way to build not just muscle, but momentum, and a calendar full of reasons to get up early on a summer morning. "I don't quilt, I don't crochet — that's not how I'm going to fit in as I age," said one member, a retired math teacher. "This feeds you in a different way."

One woman, who has twice summited Mount Kilimanjaro — a fact that makes her diving for old tires seem almost restful by comparison — admitted she used to be afraid of ponds and their murky bottoms, until she strapped on a mask and discovered, as she put it, a whole underwater paradise hiding beneath the muck. 

Turtles glide by, unbothered. Sunfish families cruise past like they own the place, which, in fairness, they do. Even the fish, some scarred by old fishhooks, seem to make an appearance as if to say thank you, or at least to check on the commotion.

Baur, for her part, has had to train herself out of complaining about aches and pains, on the theory that thirty women are watching to see whether she can hack it, and that leadership means suffering in silence while wearing a very unglamorous wetsuit. 

"I'm going to show them that being old is OK," she said — which might be the least whimsical, most quietly radical sentence in this whole delightfully weird saga, and also, arguably, the whole point. 

What can we learn from this story? What's the takeaway?

Strip away the wetsuits and the beer cans, and this is a story about reinvention with a snorkel on. The Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage didn't set out to make a grand statement about aging — they set out to clean a pond. 

But in doing something physical, communal, and slightly ridiculous well past the age society expects people to slow down, they stumbled into something bigger: proof that purpose, strength, and friendship don't have an expiration date. 

The lesson isn't really about litter. It's that showing up with a mask, a kayak, and thirty women who expect you to keep pace can be its own form of quiet defiance against the idea that getting older means doing less.

Well, there you go, my friends; that's life, I swear

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