Celine Merrim lives near Brattleboro, but she is ON THE ROAD bigtime. She has been a driver in SE Vermont for people in need since 1990 – that’s 33 years. First she drove bus for The Council on Aging in Brattleboro. Then she moved over for a few years to the related SE VT Community Action organization centered in Westminster to transport people in need of support. That job morphed into working with The Town and Village Bus in Westminster that in turn morphed into The Current Busline that, in 2005 joined a second busline to form MOOVER.
All of these bus services were and are publicly supported so nobody has to buy a ticket. MOOVER’s funds: 10% from local townships, 20% from state agencies, 70% Federal Transit Administration. So it’s important to acknowledge Celine, and others like her at Moover, have given wheels to people who don’t own cars.
We who have cars take them for granted. We just get in our cars and go….not so for a whole lot of people. If you don’t have a car, how do you get to shops, to doctor’s appointments, to build relationships with friends and family ……..? If you own a car you don’t really have to plan ahead all that much. If you don’t have a car, there is a whole LOT of planning ahead.
That’s where Celine, and MOOVER, saves the day.
Celine didn’t always live in Brattleboro. She was born in the country of Gabon in the tiny village of Osouele (pop: 300) in the 70’s, virtually on the Equator in East Africa. She married a Peace Corps volunteer and a few years later moved with him to Greenfield, Massachusetts. There, over two years, she learned the English language at Greenfield Community College. She now has two married daughters, Eshalla, now a 4thgrade teacher in Washington, DC, and Mindy, a social worker in Virginia.
I first met Celine late morning on a well-below 32 degree mid-January day at The Moover transfer station just off Ferry Road in Brattleboro. I asked her about her day up to that point. She told me she had arrived at the station before sunrise, cleaned and vacuumed the interior of her “On Demand” bus, checked the tire pressure, gas, cleaned the windows and made sure everything was ship-shape: the wheelchair lift, the twelve or so seats for special needs folks, the two wheelchair spots - everything. She then headed out and arrived in Wilmington at 6:45 AM. (Just as a reminder, she had to make a round-trip on Rte. 9, that notorious, steep, windy (albeit recently refurbished East-West state road) that, even in summer, is a challenging route that runs all the way to Bennington – which Moover also serves.
In Wilmington, she picked up her waiting riders that morning. She pulled or pushed someone in a wheelchair up the ramp and into the bus; made sure blind people or those with poor eyesight got safely up the bus steps, got settled and buckled in; she steadied the elderly….. whatever people needed. She then headed back toward Brattleboro, dropping people off as she went while being sure they were all where they wanted to be.
Other days she might drive the MOOVER bus on the route down Rte. 5 from Bellows Falls to Brattleboro: from Penguin Mart in Bellows Falls to The Transportation Center on Flat Street in Brattleboro, making 15 stops along the way – such as Allen Brothers, Basketville, C and S Grocers, Hannaford’s, Main Street. OR, people can wait on the side of the road and when they see Celine (or any of the other Moover drivers) coming in the black and white bus, put their hand up and Celine will pick you up.
Once riders take the long route on other days, Celine might be driving one of the three local routes through Brattleboro: The Red Line, Blue or White lines. Folks who take these busses know exactly when and where she’ll go and what time Celine or the others drivers will be at their stops.
Celine was quick to point out “Us drivers will always make sure no one ever gets left behind. The most important thing is to make people feel happy. We want to make sure they have no worries about how they can get from here to there on time, to feel free. A LOT of people go shopping on Fridays. They even make friends on those trips or arrange with friends to go out together for the day. They also make friends as they see each other on the bus to work every day.”
Riders have told her “I feel like I have a life now. I look forward to going to work every day.” Celine knows Moover changes people’s lives day by day. And not only the riders: “All us coworkers support each other as well as our riders. It’s all a huge support system.”
This is one of a series of some 30 profiles of working people from southern Vermont and adjacent New Hampshire that I wrote and then published in the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper every Friday from Jan 1 - May 30. Do the same with your local newspaper.