An Interview with Susan Baur

A special episode of Burning Bright, featuring an interview with Susan Baur, founder of Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage (OLAUG) and author of "In the Company of Turtles."

Transcript

Susan Baur has written books on oceanography and multiple books about psychology and psychotherapy. When she moved to Chatham, Massachusetts on Cape Cod in 2003, she began swimming in the area’s freshwater ponds where two of the things she encountered were garbage… and turtles. She responded to the garbage by forming a brigade of older women to help clean the ponds—Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage. And she responded to the turtles by photographing, drawing, and writing about them. 

In 2011, Susan published her first children’s book The Turtle Sisters of Cape Cod Pond based on her observations and experiences. And in 2025, Passager published an essay by Susan about her experience with turtles, as well as a picture she composed for the cover of that issue. 

American University intern Hope Hamerslough recently spoke with Susan. On this longer-than-usual episode of Burning Bright, excerpts from that interview. 

HOPE:  Susan, your essay that Passager published and the cover image that you created are both about swimming with turtles. Where’d that come from, your attraction to swimming with turtles? Tell us more about that. 

SUSAN:   I started swimming in ponds, and my initial reaction was that these were nasty  dangerous places to swim. There was mud the consistency of yogurt or mayonnaise or something that would ooze up between my toes and turn the water kind of coffee color, and then I would slide in, not  knowing when I was going to see a 50-pound snapping turtle or feel some slimy thing go across my arm which could be an eel or could be the stem of a water lily. So I was really quite frightened and frustrated by this, but I would swim back and forth over the little area of sand in front of me, and then I always want to go farther.  

I decided incorrectly that they must be baby snapping turtles and that the mother  was steaming to their rescue which is also incorrect and was going to grab me and take me to the bottom pond and drown me to save her children, and so I swam probably the fastest I’ve ever swam in my life and just got out of  there. But the next day I came back in a kayak and I kept trying to see them.  

HOPE:  It would’ve been so easy to decide after that to never go back. So why did you go back? 

SUSAN:  I thought of a passage from The Wind and the Willows where Rat and Mole are out in the boat, and they hear the flute-like call of coming across the water on the wind. And Rat, who, of course, is the great emotional star of The  Wind and the Willows, says, “Oh no, the sweetness of it, the joy that it must be for us,” and it was like that there; I had to follow turtles.  

HOPE: You spent much of your career as a psychotherapist. Was your time swimming in ponds and observing turtles a break from that career, or did they connect in any way? 

SUSAN:   When I was being obsessed with turtles, people would ask me, “So how does this lead back to helping people?” and I would want to smack them because I thought I don't want to leave back to people; turtles are nicer! I listened to people talk for 40 years as a psychologist. I was really happy the turtles don't make any noise. None of this was “silent;” this was all body language, and we had good conversations, but it was really restful and it was so honest, you know. Nothing that I know of in the natural world bullshits; they inhabit their own life. You don't have anxious trees; you don't have—yes, you have some butterflies pretending to be a poisonous butterfly, but basically, they don't wonder what they're going to do when they wake up in the morning; they are just full on, and yes, it's managed by instinct, and so they don't have the choices that we have, but there is a lot to say for the beauty of an underwater world. 

And I don't regret that. I think when one has an insight you bring it back because then in a sense you're master of both worlds. I know how the cultural world works: I can do the achievement; I can do the left brain stuff; I can do the getting and spending, the travelling, the whatever. But I know there's another more real, more wonderful more glorious world, and I get that, too.  

HOPE: I completely get that idea that there’s something to be said for animals not needing the same things that our social culture does. You’ve written about oceanography, about psychotherapy. Why’d you feel like you should write about turtles? 

SUSAN:   I think in my case, what being a writer did is it forced me to think through the experience. I could have just had the experience with turtles and thought, “Gee I really like turtles; I'm a turtle fan,” and left it at that. I might still have started the Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage, and it  might still have been popular, but if I couldn't say it… Everybody in every culture and every time has had a name for the experience of wonder; this is not new. For centuries, it was ascribed to God: you just saw the face of God; you just felt God. But finally it got divorced from that, and now there are books on the new science of awe enchantment, wondering the wonder in the modern world, blah blah blah. 

The short answer is that when something surprises me or puzzles me I tend to write about it because that's the way, that's just one of the ways I think. I think people have different ways of thinking and different needs to think, and a lot of  people are consumers, and they consume content, they hear stories, they watch television, and they're pretty passive. I have never been passive. I've never owned a television, actually, so that's one of the reasons you get a lot of…  You don't  care what you eat, and you don't have a television, you have a lot of extra time. So I like talking to people who like to talk about ideas and who use words, you know, very  carefully or read those people. But through the written word, that's the way I think. So that's the short answer. 

HOPE:  We’ve been talking about swimming and writing. But you’re also an artist: you illustrated your children’s books; you created the picture that’s on Passager’s cover. I read that when you swim, you have a camera on your face mask. How’d you become a visual artist? 

SUSAN:  The camera is so simple and so lousy that the turtle had to be within six inches of the surface in order to get enough light and to be 12 inches exactly on the camera in order to be in focus, and you couldn't move. Well, you never get those three together, so most of the pictures I had were slightly out of focus, a little too dark, and there was no way because it was not a wide angle lens—which was good, it didn't distort them—and it was really easy. If they were close enough to be in focus, they were too close to get the whole  turtle, so I had hundreds and hundreds of photos that lacked a leg or a head or the  back end of a shell, and so I thought what the hell, I'll just learn to draw.  

And then I realized I really needed drawing lessons, so I took drawing lessons, and the woman never understood why I just drew turtles, but you know she gave me… It's still nice to draw, and I had a turtle shell, and you know do the turtles… So I didn't take a lot of drawing lessons. I was always fairly good at drawing just because I like it. And so then in order to build this unbreakable bond between me and turtles, I had to  do illustrations for the Turtle Sisters books that became a kind of spin off of art, and just as I was sort of ready to do a whole lot of galleries from here to there, COVID hit, and there weren't any galleries open. So then I spent that time working on the book which is tentatively titled Swimming Alone at 80 but may well turn into something like Swimming Into the Headwaters of Wonderland or something like that, but the subtitle is always going to be how wonder rejoins us, you know, connects us or reconnects us to the natural world.  

And every Turtle Sister, because they're saddle stitched which is the  cheap way of doing it, has a double trunk in the middle, and so I always want a big horizontal illustration, whereas all the other ones are vertical. And that was just one of the I thought I would use that, so it's fun. I've used various photos, and sometimes I would use the photo of one turtle, and I would draw that same turtle to make it look like a twin or a sister and then  sort of challenge people which is the photograph and which is the drawing. I enjoyed doing those Turtle Sisters books. I'm still not sure exactly what I was doing. 

HOPE:  So you figured out how to draw turtles. What about drawing people? what about drawing yourself? 

SUSAN:   Because I was taking pictures of turtles, I had no pictures of myself, and one person took a picture of me while I was floating along, and it didn't have my legs, and it didn't have my  hands, and so I thought well, I'm gonna have to create my own legs and my own hands. 

HOPE:  It feels like even though you’re writing about and drawing and photographing turtles, there’s more to it than that. 

SUSAN:  It's like if you can imagine a mighty oak and you are an oak leaf, and you think, “Well, here I am, you know, in the air, and I'm taking in sun and water, and I'm doing my oak leaf job,” and then suddenly you have the insight that you are part of a mighty tree, that you are supported by this huge system and that you aren't alone, and it's not just “wow there are other leaves,” but you're part of  a system that is designed to protect you, to enhance you, also dispose of you when the time is right. It was a wonderful feeling, and it's basically changed my life from there on. So then I thought, “Oh, all right, now I can see how I've been working at cross purposes to myself: the goal is not achieve achieve achieve, that although you can't teach anybody how to have that encounter where wonder or enchantment makes them realize, gives them a new set of  eyes, and erases the boundary between me and “It” changes to a “We.”  Every time that you are spellbound or wonderstruck, it creates a “we,” and when you do that enough, you make that flip, and you realize that the reality is that we're “we,” and the dream is that humans are separate and that we the dominate the rest of the world. We wouldn't be able to take a breath if green leaves and trees weren't creating oxygen!  

The real world is the relational world with the whole natural world rather than the getting and spending. I suppose I hate to say, I hate to admit it or acknowledge it. Easier when you get older because you get to be retired, and most  people who are working or even students who are working hard don't have the luxury of sitting in the woods walking in the woods swimming on running, really being out.   

The second thing when people look is they say, “I have found my tribe; this is so wonderful; this is great camaraderie.” We're 75 years old--I'm 85 years old--it's so rare to have this group where we're now a  group of 30 women, and we are hot stuff: there's nurses and doctors and lawyers and former professors, and I mean they're all Type-A; every single one of them is a Type-A, and they're just… and you make friends very fast when sort of your life depends on them when you're swimming with them, and if anything happens to you, you hope they're paying attention. And so you get the environmental goodness, the usefulness; you get the camaraderie; you get the raising of awareness, the education. 

HOPE: Yeah, that idea of the interdependence of all the parts of nature, that we’re a piece but not the dominant piece… Anything else? 

SUSAN:  I always want to see sort of what's in that zone between the light and the dark, and whether I think of my first career really as a writer about the history of marine science… The title of my first book was The Edge of an Unfamiliar World, and I've never lost a fascination with the edge of unfamiliar worlds, so later in life I became a psychologist which certainly is studying the dark parts of minds, and I have a fascination with ponds, which are the dark sides of water, dark zone of the water.  

HOPE:  I could listen to you all day, Susan, but we’re about out of time. What do you want to leave us with? 

SUSAN:  You know, you've probably read or heard of Joseph Campbell's hero of a thousand faces. And he says about how you get the invitation to go on the journey, and you refuse the invitation, and then you have a mentor and a magic talisman. And I think the first mask I had with the little camera in it was sort of the magic feather that said, “Ok, you know now I belong in these ponds,” and I'm going to take all these pictures, and when you come back you are master of two worlds, and you have to take that next step. When the journey is finished, the journey is finished, and then you start on something else, and the journey begins again, but  it begins with people rather than by yourself, and that's sort of where I where I am now.  

Susan said her newest book shows how moments of wonder like the ones she felt while swimming with turtles in Cape Cod ponds reconnected her to the natural world. She said, “In my experience, there is no deeper joy than realizing you have fallen in step with the power that supports life.” That book is set to be published in 2026 by the University of Massachusetts Press. 

To purchase the issue of Passager that features Susan’s work, subscribe to, donate to, or learn more about Passager and its commitment to older writers, visit passagerbooks.com.  

Passager offers a 25% discount on the books and journal issues featured here on Burning Bright. Visit our website to see what's on sale this week. 

Thanks to American University intern Hope Hamerslaugh for interviewing Susan Baur.  

And by the way, this is our last Burning Bright episode ‘til early September. Passager’s staff takes off a few weeks every year to go on vacation, power wash the deck, have babies, you know… We’ll be back, though, with another season of Burning Bright. 

For Mary, Christine, Rosanne, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.