MERRAG at Sunset

The world is changing. Not to sound ill-advisedly sentimental, but the Human Touch is quickly going the way of the Triceratops. Today our consensual twin summits – Efficiency and Optimization – are turning us into almost childlike fans of automata. Robots, algorithms, and computer-generated flapdoodle are obsoleting such exotica as warm-blooded human beings walking through your neighborhood with two-way radios. “Hey! Hello! You okay?” 

Trish Davis remembers a big wildfire many years ago and the calming effect of … people? “I wasn’t with MERRAG at the time, but I was coming through the intersection and everywhere you looked was just nothing but black. People were out of their cars taking pictures and everything, it was just terrible. But I looked down the hill and saw the MERRAG tent, and I just felt like – okay – I have a connection. The world’s not going to end.” 

Bill Vollero describes an occasion of seeing it from the other side – manning the MERRAG base camp at the Corner Green in Montecito’s Upper Village. A cohort of familiar faces can profoundly settle the nerves, take the paralyzing edge off a calamity. “It is true,” Vollero says. “You could feel the anxiety of people, but by the time you finished, they were a little better. They were a little more settled.” 

Whole “eras” come and go, on both history’s grand stage and in small forested towns. Sometimes as a chapter draws to a close there is an accompanying burst of public pageantry – THIS MARKS THE END OF SOMETHING. More often, though, meaningful, decades-long stories conclude with little more than a bittersweet fare-thee-well among friends seated around a table; they who have seen a particular epoch to its conclusion. I’m seated around such a table at Fire Station #91 – Montecito Fire Protection District Headquarters – with a handful of Montecitans as they tie up the final loose ends of a unique community enterprise to which they’ve long been devoted. 

“We did a lot together,” says Vice President Yolanda Clements with some emotion. Her colleagues silently nod. “We were a tight team. As small as the team became by the end, it was a very tight, supporting team. We never wavered. And I just want to thank all of you for having me on the team. I loved it.” The mood isn’t exactly melancholy, but a door is closing as the minutes pass, and you can almost hear the hinges working. Yolanda, David Boyd, Trish Davis, Maude Feil, and Bill Vollero have gathered one last time to do a little housekeeping; the final rolling up of an all-volunteer emergency response group called MERRAG. 

What Was

In distant 1987, Montecito Fire Protection District Chief Herb McElwee came up with a terrific idea. In the event of a natural catastrophe, our woodland idyll would rally in a state of trained preparedness – thanks to the organized efforts of a mobile, all-volunteer citizens emergency auxiliary who would interweave their learned skill sets with the town they knew and loved. Chief McElwee called his new program Montecito Emergency Response and Recovery Action Group; MERRAG. The spoken acronym sounds like “Mirage” and indeed, in the midst of a dispiriting emergency, seeing these neighborly volunteer Montecitans – with their rolling radio command center of a van, their vivid MERRAG canopy, and their confidently smiling faces – could be as spirit-lifting as the shimmering oasis the desert wanderer sees at the peak of dehydrated panic. 

But the MERRAG oasis was as real as it gets – neighbor helping neighbor with emergency readiness, with FEMA-sponsored CERT training (Community Emergency Response Team) designed to authentically boost community self-reliance; with hometown preparedness fomented by fellow Montecitans whose expertise and cheery familiarity would project priceless community calm in the face of darkling emergencies. At a special farewell ceremony held at Fire Station 91 on December 6, current MFPD Chief David Neels eloquently summarized the nearly 40-year MERRAG saga: 

“For 37 years, MERRAG volunteers served the Montecito community under the guidance and support of the Montecito Fire, Water and Sanitary Districts. MERRAG members responded to major incidents, including the Tea Fire and 1/9 Debris Flow, during the first, critical hours of emergency response. The dedication and service of these volunteers is memorialized with an olive tree planted at Fire Station 91 as well as a plaque in our lobby. These serve as everlasting reminders of the profound impact MERRAG made on our community and fire department, always in service of their fellow neighbors. We are forever grateful for the efforts
of MERRAG.”

Trish Davis is unequivocal, characterizing Chief Neels as a MERRAG-empathetic sweetheart, obliged to fulfill his duty to the changing norms of public safety but personally endeared to the MERRAG mission, gently slow-walking the group into the sunlight of the new reality.

“Chief Neels has been wonderful. So many times I watched him come into the room and he would have the courage to say ‘we’re changing this, we’re changing that…’” On one such visit Trish could just make out the faint traces of handwriting on a wall. “I finally realized there’s really no room for MERRAG in this new program.” 

Time and Love and MERRAG

The very idea of “new” reminds us, sometimes piercingly, of the irretrievable flight of our days and nights, our delights and sorrows. “Yesterday” is a three-syllable pile of luggage we unpack at our peril. The melancholy isn’t finally to do with change itself, but with the way everything happens exactly once. MERRAG blossomed and served in a time before the internet, before email and texts, and today’s reflexive pursuit of immediacy – which comes in handy in an emergency, but in all other aspects of daily life serves to distractedly hurry the sands through the hourglass. 

None of that is in evidence around this table in Station 91’s conference room, where this small band of wry MERRAG veterans perform the custodial duties of closure. These people are an almost teleplay-ready cross section, as Trish explained to me in an earlier meeting at the Corner Green – MERRAG base camp for decades.

“Bill’s a psychiatrist. And then you have Yolanda, who’s a physical therapist. You have David, who was a submarine commander in the Navy…” Maude Feil is a wardrobe stylist and costume designer. And you have Trish; Golden Age of Air Travel Flight Attendant for American Airlines (around the time Jacqueline Bisset played the role in the movies), Department of Airports tour guide for LAX (where she had to help sneak the disguised Charles Manson jury to their plane), Chair of the Montecito Association’s History Committee, and serial volunteer for decades in local efforts too numerous to name here. “Sometimes you just have to slow down,” she broadly concedes. MERRAG’s remaining assets and monies are being very generously donated to grateful, stunned orgs in the area, leading in one instance to a brief misunderstanding Trish was quick to correct. “I told my friend I’m working with Search and Rescue, and they said, ‘what – are you going to rappel over the side of a cliff and rescue people?’ I said, are you kidding me?! I can’t even open a jar of Mayo!” 

The meeting is wrapping. David – former sub commander and ever the laconic commenter – offers up his own elegy. “Well, I’m the high tent pole in this group, being 96 years old,” he says with a rueful grin. “I certainly went through some great experiences with MERRAG, back when it was a different world. At this point, starting this new year, we have a few things to take care of and then it’s a final lunch. And that’ll be sort of the end.” He looks around the table. “Good morning.”