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The road to enlightenment can take a person through unexpected and often unlikely terrains. For Susan Baur, that road deposited her in a series of ponds in the Cape Cod area of Massachusetts.
Baur’s journey is the focus of her memoir, “Swimming With Turtles: How Wonder Reconnects Us to the Natural World.” It’s a happy celebration of nature and an eccentric but charming consideration of how the author has embraced new experiences during her senior years.
Meeting Pond Denizens
Baur was a prominent oceanographer and science writer before switching careers to become a psychologist. At the age of 63, she fell in love with an 81-year-old who’s only identified as Peter. The couple shared similar personal backgrounds. Both were divorced with grown children, and both were eager for a new period of romantic companionship.
Shortly after moving into Peter’s Cape Cod home, Baur injured herself while jogging. She considered switching her athletic pursuits to swimming but felt that the Atlantic coastline’s waters were too rough and challenging. Peter recommended swimming in local ponds, and she settled on School House Pond in Chatham, Massachusetts.
At this pond, she encountered a pair of gray turtles, who observed her aquatic exercise. She was enthralled by their presence.
“Like five-inch-long astronauts, their movements were effortless,” she writes, noting with awe how two turtles casually approached and made physical contact with her hand and shoulder.
Baur began spending a considerable amount of her free time going through different ponds in search of turtles. She was soon able to identify the different turtle species and felt awed to witness them in their natural habitats.
Redirecting Her Life
Peter encouraged Baur’s newfound mania by crafting a diving mask with a built-in camera. However, she seemed to overthink her relationship with him. In her book, the author explains that she believed Peter saw her as “his last chance to do a relationship right,” while she viewed him as her “first chance to see how a person managed his final years.”
Unfortunately, Peter’s final years were plagued with heart problems that required hospitalization and surgery. Baur declined a marriage proposal from Peter because it was sent via email, and she later rued that rejection. After Peter’s death, she had to move out of the house they’d shared, which his children inherited and sold.
Baur began to put more time and energy into swimming through Cape Cod’s ponds to study turtles. Using the knowledge she’d gained from these forays, she authored and self-published a series of children’s books featuring the adventures of Daphne and Chloe, “The Turtle Sisters.”
In her first book, “The Turtle Sisters of Cape Cod Pond,” Baur casts herself as a splashing swimmer that Daphne and Chloe refer to as the “Noisy Thing.” Follow-up books had the Turtle Sisters confronting a nasty snapping turtle and then being forced to leave their home pond due to disruptive human intrusion.
She also authored and self-published a book for adults called “A Guide to the Best Ponds on Cape Cod, and the Best Ways of Preserving Them.” She glumly admits that the book generated no interest from Cape Cod residents.
Finding New Purpose
Baur also founded the nonprofit volunteer organization Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage (OLAUG), which encourages its members to dive into Cape Cod’s ponds and remove litter while preserving aquatic habitats for marine life. In 2025, OLAUG coordinated a 30-woman force that cleaned 20 regional ponds.
Baur’s dedication to conservation and spreading awareness about the local ecosystem is commendable, but some of her behavior recounted in the book could charitably be described as odd.
For example, after an underwater encounter with a curious and friendly turtle, she emerges from the pond, notices several crows sitting in a tree, and affirms her kinship with the reptile by yelling, “We love each other!” at the birds. The response from the crows isn’t recorded.
As for her human interactions, six years after Peter’s death, she had a brief romance with a diabetic widower who’s only identified as the “Man from Dennis,” a reference to his Cape Cod locality. She reflects that they had “little in common except for a loneliness that drew us together like the magnets used to lift wrecked cars.”
Not unlike a wrecked car dumped in a junkyard by the magnet, the author is quickly abandoned when her lover is lured away by an old girlfriend.
Strangely, Baur’s family is barely mentioned in her book. There are passing references to her children and grandchildren and a brief mention of visiting some of them in Hawaii. However, she never identifies them by name, nor does she share what they feel about her turtle initiatives.
Still, “Swimming With Turtles” has an odd charm that reminds the reader that nature isn’t as mysterious or indecipherable as one might imagine. The author’s enthusiasm is strong, and her advocacy for protecting the ecosystem’s inhabitants deserves praise.
‘Swimming with Turtles: How Wonder Reconnects Us to the Natural World’
By Susan Baur
Bright Leaf: Sept. 8, 2026
Hardcover, 224 pages
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