Turtles Help Founder Of Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage Reconnect With Natural World

In “Swimming with Turtles: How Wonder Reconnects Us to the Natural World” (Bright Leaf, 2026), author Susan Baur tackles profound topics such as love, loss, aging and turtles.

 Yes, turtles.

 These days Baur, 86, is best known as the founder of Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage (OLAUG), 30 women ages 65 to 86 who have removed an estimated 6,000 pounds of trash from the Cape’s ponds.

OLAUG has garnered “incredible publicity,” including a documentary film and a front-page story in the New York Times’ print edition of July 18 “above the fold,” as Baur noted during a recent telephone interview.

But before OLAUG, Baur was a practicing psychologist and a writer. She is based these days in North Falmouth, but she lived for a number of years in Chatham, particularly during the period when her luminous memoir begins.

“Swimming with Turtles” was a pandemic project. In 2020, the year she retired and turned 80, Baur and her family were scheduled to make a “bucket list” trip to France. With the pandemic, plans fell apart, and Baur instead rented a house on Training Field Road in Chatham. Once there, she pulled out her swimsuit, kayak and snorkels, and went exploring the ponds that she had become so intimate with over a decade earlier when she lived in Chatham.

“I saw 12 turtles,” she says. “Every one of them practically saluted me, practically blew me a kiss.”

Back in the house, she started writing her book and produced what she describes as a “dreadful” first draft that was essentially “Susan’s adventures with turtles.”

In the years that she had consistently swum in the ponds she had taken notes in an oversized drawing book. She now pulled out that book that was full of her drawings of turtles and maps of ponds. Also, it contained a swim log recording “what I found and how I felt.” She calls her drawing book “a trail of breadcrumbs — how wonder changes a person.”

“Then I realized that writing the book was the journey,” she says. She got to work on a second draft that was about a lot more than “adventures with turtles.”

Baur dedicates the book to the memory of Peter Wiseman, a two-term Chatham selectman whom she met in 2003 after he read her book “The Love of Your Life: What We Learn from Living in the Grip of Passion” (2001) and wrote her a fan letter. They met for lunch at the Impudent Oyster. Baur was 63 to Wiseman’s 81. Although Baur thought Wiseman was too old for her, within months they were in love. Baur moved into Wiseman’s house on Cow Yard Lane and commuted to North Falmouth, where she continued to practice psychology.

In Chatham, Baur loved to swim, but she found the off-shore currents “problematic.”

Wiseman suggested that Baur swim in the town’s ponds. She began snorkeling in White’s Pond in Chatham, then moved on to try a different pond each afternoon.

And then she “finally met the wildlife,” as she put it. She describes floating through the water with two small musk turtles, and even holding hands with one. If she was in love with Wiseman, she soon fell in love with turtles, too.

“The first years with Peter were the glory years of turtling,” she writes. In a sense, those swims changed her life. “Dropping into the underwater world put me in exactly the right state of mind to find enchantment.”

Wiseman died in September 2009 at age 88. The fall came, and the pond turtles prepared to hibernate. When the ponds became too cold for her to swim, Baur, grieving, moved back to North Falmouth. But the next spring she returned to the ponds.

If underwater she discovered a magical world, she also discovered that “time stops. You are a perfect person in another world,” she says. “There’s nowhere else you’d rather be. You’re with it. You’re inside it.” In fact, “you escape from the cage of self.”

She describes the underwater world as a “no spin zone. Nobody lies to you.” Her memoir is not just for nature lovers but for people who want to live fully at any age. “If you recalibrate and put your trust in the natural world, that’s a better way of living,” Baur says.

Baur has also published four illustrated books for children called “The Turtle Sisters.”

Baur’s launch for “Swimming with Turtles” will be held at Yellow Umbrella Books in Chatham on Saturday, Sept. 5 from 1 to 4 p.m.

The Friends of Chatham Waterways will present the first public screening of the award-winning, 15-minute film “OLAUG,” directed by Liz McGregor, at the Chatham Orpheum Theater on Saturday, Sept. 12 at 10 a.m. After the screening Baur will give a talk on her book that will be followed by a panel discussion with members of OLAUG. To register for the free event, visit chathamorpheum.org.

Later in the fall Baur will speak at the Brooks Free Library in Harwich and at the Eldredge Public Library. For information on these events, visit SusanBaurAuthor.com.