Imagine yourself on Cape Cod on a bright summer afternoon. The water looks perfect: glassy, blue, reflecting the clouds like it’s a computer screensaver. Suddenly, a dozen or so women burst onto the scene. Not one is a day under 65, and they’re zipping themselves into wetsuits and spitting into their masks (to prevent fogging) before slipping beneath that pretty blue surface to retrieve all the secrets the pond’s been hiding: beer cans, golf balls, a car tire, and once, an 80-pound toilet.

Who are these silver-haired, litter-busting sirens? 

Meet the elite squad known as the “Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage” (OLAUG), a Cape Cod nonprofit made up of senior women who kayak, free-dive, and pull submerged trash out of freshwater ponds. They’re really good at it, too: By their own estimation, OLAUG has removed roughly 6,000 pounds of waste since the group’s founding in 2017. There are requirements to join, of course:

Be at least 64 years old.

Pass a swim test. (Tryouts are held in the spring, and members must be able to swim half a mile in under 30 minutes and free-dive to a minimum depth of 8 feet.)

The magic lies within the first two prerequisites. Many of the group’s members arrive at OLAUG in search of something: identity, friends, purpose, excitement, joie de vivre. Rarely, trash.

“By the time a woman is in her late 60s, she has experienced loss. People in our group have lost breasts, homes, husbands, and wealth,” says OLAUG’s 85-year-old founder, Susan Baur. “They are in the age of gratitude.”

It started with turtles, not trash

Baur is a retired psychologist who settled on Cape Cod in her early sixties and learned to love its ponds after deciding the open Atlantic was too dangerous  to swim in.

She got attached to the ponds’ snapping turtles, giving them names like “Mr. Spot” and “Silver Patches.” This was strictly for practical reasons, she assures, claiming she needed a way to “distinguish them” in her mind. As more visitors arrived at the turtle pond, she tried everything to protect their habitat, from signs to homemade “turtle housing,” but nothing worked.

Frustrated, Baur headed to the pond in 2017 and waved down a man in a yellow kayak, dropped a laundry basket between his legs, and the two of them—plus a couple of friends—fished out a haul of golf balls, cans, and bottles. Someone in the group joked they were “a........

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