SALLY POLLAK

Free Press Staff Writer

BARRE - Just past downtown Barre, you'll come to a street called Liberty. Nearby is Freedom Way. Either one will get you to Orange Street and the big white house with a sign on front:

WE ALL LIVE DOWNSTREAM.

The house belongs to Crystal Zevon, political activist, videographer, writer, mother, grandmother.

The words Zevon chose to post on her house, and the street signs that happen to be nearby, together form a billboard that express a triumvirate of Zevon's concerns.

Zevon, 64, is an activist who has worked in her own neighborhood, and on the other side of the world. She fights for economic justice and protests against war. She will take a cause to Congress through legislation, and sleep in the street in the nation's capital. Zevon's interests concern climate change, economic justice, peace, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, poverty and education. Her approach to the issues can be as varied as the causes.

"There are days when I think it's all useless," Zevon said last week at her house. "But I've got grandchildren. ... I do it because I can do it. I have the means. I have the time. I think I have the background, the understanding of certain things. I have the psychic ability to do it. I'm not afraid of it. I think there have to be people who are willing to go the distance. We're necessary to get more middle of the road people at least conscious."

Although Zevon's activism often takes her out of Vermont, she has worked locally in various capacities. In Barre, she was involved with LACE (Local Agricultural Community Exchange), a local food/farming organization founded by her daughter, Ariel Zevon.

With a nonprofit component, LACE distinguished itself from other sustainable food outfits by its commitment to under-served populations and broader community engagement. This was achieved by a variety of means, including bowls of soup by donation and a cafe, Bad Boy Bistro, run by young men who had recently been in jail. LACE closed three years ago.

"Ariel wanted to provide a place where the people who are coming out of the courthouse, hanging out at Dunkin' Donuts smoking cigarettes, will have an opportunity to eat good food," Zevon said.

Support for LACE came from musician and activist Jackson Browne, Ariel Zevon's godfather, who performed benefit concerts at the Barre Opera House. U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D.-Vermont, attended the June 2007 LACE opening.

In an email sent last week from Hanoi, Leahy responded to a question about Zevon's activism: "I've always admired her idealism and her humanitarianism, and her seemingly boundless energy," he wrote.

Zevon is in South Dakota today with Clean Up the Mines, a group that is working to get the federal government to pass legislation to clean up abandoned uranium mines. An event is planned for Earth Day at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Last month, for International Women's Day, Zevon attempted to travel to Gaza on a humanitarian mission with members of Code Pink, a women's peace and social justice group. The women carried microscopes, baby clothes and solar lanterns.

Zevon also carried letters of introduction from the three members of Vermont's Congressional delegation. Yet the trip was thwarted when Zevon was detained at the airport in Cairo for 28 hours, and sent back to this country.

"It was a harrowing experience," Zevon said. "It was very traumatic."

'Serious political reasons'

In October 2011, Zevon moved into a tent at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., as part of Occupy Washington, D.C. It was time to get "back in the street," said Zevon, who's been taking to the street for decades. These efforts include protesting the Vietnam War and opposing the construction of Diablo Canyon, a nuclear power plant on the California coast. She was arrested at Diablo Canyon, the first of about half a dozen arrests.

On the streets of Washington, Zevon was a key member of the Occupy movement in the nation's capital, helping to establish and organize the encampment. Some of her advance work was done in a hospital room, by the side of her dying father.

The group arrived in Washington with a weekend permit for the park and an understanding that "nothing's working," Zevon said. Their imperative was to create a new world, she said. They outlasted their permit by four months. Zevon settled into her tent with a sleeping bag and air mattress.

"I don't think anyone thought we'd stay four months," she said. "We had a kitchen. We had great food. We planned actions. We were there for serious political reasons."

Although Occupy movements around the country were sometimes criticized for lacking a clear mandate and articulated goal, the movement crystallized for Zevon a growing sense that pressing political and social issues are interconnected. The issues are bound, she believes, by the profound urgency of climate change.

"We wanted to be in a place where we would start to attack the pillars of power," Zevon said. "We meant it: Create a new world. We wanted to address what's going on within established institutions and either force them to change —or collapse."

In Washington, Zevon worked on the Occupy movement with Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of Code Pink.

"Crystal was one of the more mature, grounded and effective people in Occupy D.C," Benjamin said. She brought wisdom to the movement, knowledge of a breadth of issues, and a great appreciation for people and their stories — and for getting their messages to a wide audience, Benjamin said.

"She's a real activist," Benjamin said. "She devotes so much time and creativity to these issues. She's an asset to the activist community, and she brings that nurturing, kind of mothering, quality as well."

Zevon's interest in justice goes back more than half a century to her childhood in Aspen, Colo. She lived with her family in an apartment behind a small motel, the Glory Hole, owned by her parents. When Zevon (then Crystal Brelsford) was 11, a black family moved to Aspen from Memphis, Tenn.

Zevon and a girl in that family became best friends, and Zevon wanted to invite her friend for a sleepover. Her parents said no. When Zevon asked why, she was told it might not be good for her parents' business.

"The hypocrisy hit me over the head," Zevon said. "That set me off. And I started to learn what was going on."

Zevon's parents later said it was the worst mistake they made.

The year after the prohibited sleepover, when Zevon was 12, she learned Martin Luther King would be in Denver. She stole money from the motel cash box and bought a bus ticket to Denver. At Loveland Pass, the bus stopped, state troopers boarded it and escorted her off. They delivered Zevon to her parents in Aspen.

It was an early iteration of what would be a recurring theme: Zevon stopped by authorities in pursuit of social justice.

Vermont in '67, and long after

Zevon's ties to Vermont date to the 1960s, when she walked away from a scholarship to Bennington College. Yet she was here in 1967, when she lived in the Mad River Valley with guitarist Waddy Wachtel. He was playing in a band called Twice Nicely, the house band at the (defunct) Blue Tooth.

Wachtel became a well-known session player in L.A., where he played with Warren Zevon, the late singer-songwriter whom Crystal Zevon married in the 1970s.

Crystal Zevon raised their daughter, Ariel, in Los Angeles and Paris. They were living in Paris when Ariel decided to go to college in southern Vermont, to study theater at Marlboro College. So Zevon left Paris, where she was working with the French government to establish a residential facility for substance abuse. She moved to Brattleboro.

Zevon has lived mostly in Vermont since then, off and on the past 11 years in the big house in Barre. She lived in the house with her daughter and grandsons until last May, when Ariel Zevon and her 10-year-old twins, Max and Gus, moved off the grid to Peacham.

Musical instruments fill the basement, kids' art work hangs in the kitchen, and political banners, signs and buttons are stashed throughout the house. Zevon opens her home to groups that need a meeting place, and she hosts free community meals.

"I thought of turning it into an activists' house," Zevon said. "But I've lived alone for a lot of years. And the truth is I don't really like living with other people."

In the refurbished third floor Zevon is working on her current project, a documentary about the Occupy movement called "Searching for Occupy."

"After the encampments closed down, I got really depressed," Zevon said. "I came out of the '60s. I really believed back then that we were going to have a revolution and change the world. Ninety-five percent of the people I was revolting with became stockbrokers."

With her dog Wilma, Zevon traveled around the country for four months in the winter and spring of 2013, researching and shooting her film. She drove about 30,000 miles in her Prius, mostly staying in the homes of Occupy participants. Zevon is currently editing her video footage.

"Every person who was involved in that movement is sort of at the ready for another wave," Zevon said.

A few days before flying to South Dakota for the Earth Day event, Zevon drove to West Danville, where she and Ariel Zevon are considering buying the general store. There are no plans, just ideas.

Maybe LACE will be reincarnated at Joe's Pond, where vacationers will buy kale with their six-packs and talk about climate change with chit-chat about the weather.

"As long as there's some level of comfort, people don't want to wake up," Zevon said. "I feel like the activist's job is to wake people up. There's more hope in Vermont, so less inclination to feel like you have to lay your body across the railroad tracks."

Contact Sally Pollak at spollak@freepressmedia.com or 660-1859; www.twitter.com/vtpollak