Unplugged in Peacham: Ariel Zevon builds a life in NEK

PEACHAM – Halfway between Los Angeles and Paris is Peacham, a trio of places connected by Ariel Zevon.

Zevon is a self-described "city girl" who grew up in L.A. and Paris. She is making a home for herself and her kids on a hillside above this Northeast Kingdom village.

Zevon discovered Vermont more than 20 years ago as a student at Marlboro College. She felt she had found a "magical" place, one that reminded her of the Hobbit books she read growing up.

"It was like I had moved to the place of my childhood fantasies," Zevon, 39, said. "It was magical. I knew when I had kids I would come back to stay. I always had a deep longing to settle, and put down roots."

Zevon and her twin sons, Gus and Max, who are almost 12, moved to Peacham two and a half years ago. They came from Barre, where Zevon ran an organization she founded called LACE (Local Agricultural Community Exchange). Its various enterprises — a community kitchen, a café run by young men getting out of prison, soup by donation — were bound by Zevon's commitment to social and economic justice, mostly through food. Zevon likes to give food away.

LACE closed four years ago, around the time Zevon got divorced and purchased 40 acres in Peacham. The land is high above neighboring farms, on a rough dirt road whose tail section — roughly half a mile — Zevon plows in winter. Goats cleared trees and brush at Zevon's off-the-grid homestead, and wander the hillside as they please.

"I fenced us in," she laughed, "and gave the goats the rest."

Zevon and her boys eat pigs they raise, cook and shower outside in warm weather, and cook and heat with wood in the winter. She recognized a "very conscientious shift" that occurred when the family started eating pigs born and raised on their land.

"The weight of it, and the gratitude for it," Zevon said. "It's pretty intense stuff for a city girl who was a vegetarian for 14 years."

The exterior structure of Zevon's 24-by-24 foot house was built by an ecological designer, Buzz Ferver, whose design considerations concern the ecology of the site: sun, light, wind, water, privacy, views.

"If you're careful and you understand those things, then you can build a structure that's very respectful of the space, the land," Ferver said.

He was concerned, as well, with beauty, and making a building that is reflection of Zevon, he said.

"I tried to build an extension of who she is, what she is to me," Ferver said. He wanted the house "to look really cool," and made the roof on a diagonal that rises to the structure's uphill southern exposure.

The wood siding is made from spruce trees harvested on Ferver's Worcester land. Thousands of pieces of spruce, from 3/ 4 of an inch to two inches wide, comprise the siding. The one-of-a-kind design feature was inspired by a patch of striated maple trees on Zevon's land, the horizontal stripes in the bark made by browsing moose.

"Ariel is definitely unique," Ferver said. "She doesn't limit herself at all."

Zevon built the interior of the house, including furniture, and has constructed sheds and a barn. She salvaged bed springs for garden trellises, and kept a stash of wooden pallets from LACE for making various structures.

Water and light

Her first summer in Peacham, Zevon hauled water from a stream. Then she tapped a line into the water, and it flowed downhill to an outdoor sink. Later, she dug a three to four foot trench from her house to a wet hill side some distance away. She spent three days hanging out in the trench, trying to figure out what's next?

Zevon got her backhoe and started to dig a well, thinking the whole time, "It's never gonna work. It's never gonna work." Six feet down there was a "whoosh!" and clean water gurgled from a rock ledge. She filled the well with stones, and ran a water line through the trench into her house. Water flows year-round.

Zevon constructed a low wall and stone walkway from big rocks she dug up on her land. She made the slate floor from roof tiles salvaged from her old house in Barre, and turned the LACE counter into her kitchen table. Ladders to the sleeping lofts and a hardwood floor were made with reclaimed lumber. Zevon built a bench in the bathroom for her composting toilet. A cut-out section supports one of the few household objects Zevon purchased new: a toilet seat decorated with shimmery animal faces.

"I've always been a person who likes to try to figure out how to do stuff on my own, first," Zevon said. … "Nothing is really finished. You get it to functional, and move on."

For a year, Zevon and her boys lived without power in Peacham. After a while, she bought a used solar system from a man in Danville. Zevon helped take the solar panels down, then drove home and put them back up. The set-up gave the family electricity through one outlet (with no switches). This worked for a while, but choosing between a light and a computer for kids to do homework or watch Netflix wasn't ideal.

"The no power thing was charming and quaint for a while. I kind of miss that," Zevon said. "For me, I could live without power, period. Here I am, trying my best to be as unplugged in as I can. To relieve my guilt of partaking in a culture and a system that I think is so destructive."

Last summer, with more solar panels in place, an electrician wired the house.

"Look guys!" Zevon said to her children. "We have light switches."

At Marlboro College, where Zevon studied theater and sociology, she learned that a person can do what she sets out to do, what she puts her mind to. Zevon had practice for that kind of living as a child.

"I grew up an only child of a single mother, a latch-key kid who moved around a lot," Zevon said. "I spent a lot of time figuring out how to do stuff: entertain myself, feed myself, take public transportation. Having to fend for myself at an early age set a tone for me: Well, you got to figure it out. And possibly fed my imagination that if I want to create a world I want to live in, I have to make it."

She was raised by her mother, Crystal Zevon, a political activist who lives in Barnet. Together, Ariel and Crystal Zevon run a seasonal community café in Peacham, the Peacham Café. Zevon said she loves cooking for people, and the café is lovely place — but she has concerns about food as a business enterprise.

"It's a struggle for me a little bit," Zevon said. "Just because I did go pretty radical after LACE."

Her father was Warren Zevon, a singer and songwriter who died 12 years ago. He lived to meet Max and Gus, who were born in Los Angeles three months before their grandfather died in that city.

Sheet music for his songs "Werewolves of London" and "Excitable Boy" are on the piano in Zevon's living room. Her father came from "no man's land" to make his way as a musician, she said.

"Who knows how he set out to learn piano?" Zevon said. "I don't know how he ended up tutoring with Igor Stravinsky, but he did. … There is a strain in our family: Go out and figure out your own way to do it."

Pigs, coffee and goat's milk

A rooster crowed at the break of dawn, and a light came on in Zevon's basement. A few minutes later, Zevon was in her barn greeting and feeding goats.

She patted the little ones and called her milkers by name into the small parlor. Zevon milked her goats in the dark.

A rooster and hens looked down on the proceedings from a beam in the barn. A rabbit ran across the barnyard.

After she milked goats, Zevon walked down the hill to feed her pigs. Light was starting to fill the sky, the boys were sleeping inside.

In her kitchen, Zevon boiled water for coffee and heated goat's milk to pour in it, making a Paris-worthy drink at her home in Peacham.

A friend sent an early-morning text asking how the wood splitting was going.

A big pile of firewood is split and ready for winter. Things get easier with each season.

Now it was time to wake the boys.

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

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