MASHPEE—Pulling an abandoned toilet from the dark depths of Johns Pond requires rope, strength...and cookies.
The 25 volunteers known as Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage accept only cookies as payment for their plunges into Cape Cod's filthiest ponds.
"When you dive for trash, you have no idea whether you're going to find something that's going to break your heart, or something of astounding beauty," said Baur, 84, the group's cofounder.
It's often a bit of both, as she explained to Morning Edition's Patrick Flanary.
Patrick Flanary With about 900 ponds on Cape Cod, where do you begin?
Susan Baur, cofounder, Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage We begin by getting a wonderful list from the Cape Cod Commission and finding out which are the big ones, more than ten acres, and of those which ones are covered with weeds. Knock those out, and we're left with a couple of hundred.
PF What are some of the filthiest ponds you've encountered thus far?
SB That's a bad question; we work for cookies! If someone had told me 20 years ago that, when I hit my 80s, people are going to want to have their picture taken with me in front of a bunch of trash and they're going to bake me cookies, I would not have believed them. But you don't get that kind of goodwill by saying, "Oh, let me tell you about the trashiest ponds I've ever found." So you'll have to ask it a different way.
PF Fair enough. Can you tell us where you extracted this porcelain bowl from recently?
SB Yes, when we set up our summer schedule, we have to scout every pond that we might possibly clean up. Because there are ponds that are remarkably clean. An awful lot of what we found has has blown off or fallen off, but we also find stuff that has been dumped into the ponds: truck tires, car tires, tires with rims on them, tires without rims on them. We've found one place that has 100 golf balls. We haven't cleaned it up yet. That's going to be a crazy dive.
PF And where does all this trash end up? Do you all take it to a transfer station?
SB We don't. We try to work as much as we can with pond associations, because one of the things we do is clean ponds; the other thing we do is encourage community. So we get them to bring us water and coffee and hot drinks. We get them to provide the kayaks for us so we don't have to schlep our kayaks there. They paddle for us and bag up the trash after we look at it and get as much information from it as we can. I didn't realize that some towns, of course, don't have garbage pickup.
PF Your team is 25 women. Is that right? How have you grown over the last seven years or so?
SB We were just a small band of friends. We'd say, "Hey, you want to clean up a pond?" And then about 14 months ago, we held tryouts because there's tremendous enthusiasm. There's enthusiasm to follow what we're doing there, so we have tryouts. You have to swim a half a mile in under 30 minutes. You have to be able to dive eight feet for golf balls. And now we're adding something as of next year: speed trials. Because it's very important that when I pair people up, two swimmers to a kayak, I don't put a swimmer who can do a full mile in 30 minutes with a swimmer who can barely do half a mile.
PF How old is the oldest lady among you?
SB Me. I'm 84.
PF Have you been swimming your entire life?
SB No, I've been a runner. I started swimming at 55, but we have a coach. We have a woman, Julia Benz, who was All-American, ranked sixth in the nation. And she improves our strokes. And I've been listening because I love that kind of stuff. And at 84, nothing improves my body but my swimming. I recently swam a mile; it used to take me an hour and it took me 53 minutes. That's the only thing that's improved in my 80s.
PF What do you get from a garbage dive that you don't necessarily get from only swimming for pleasure or for exercise?
SB Oh, it's a whole different experience. There are people we've recruited who are swimmers. That's their exercise, and they love the water. But ponds are a whole different deal: It may be raining, the water may be murky, there may be snapping turtles. You don't know what you're going to find. This is an adventure.
When you dive in a pond for trash, you have no idea whether you're going to find something that's going to break your heart — we found a snapping turtle that had swallowed a fisherman's hook — or whether you're going to find something of astounding beauty, a shaft of sunlight coming through the water as if the whole pond had turned into a cathedral.
When you dive for garbage, you are not only just immersed in the water, you're immersed in the experience. This changes a person. It's a challenge. We ignite a kind of chain reaction of admiration and respect and helpfulness and hope, and it becomes a love fest. We have people now who go up to people who are standing on docks driving golf balls, and they say, "Excuse me, sir, but our pond has just been cleaned. You can't do that anymore." It's a movement.
