When Joey finally–initially reluctantly–decided to help me with this series of articles, we talked a couple of times on the phone. Then we finally met in person at Espresso News in downtown Boone, which is where so many pivotal things in his life have taken place over the last several decades.
It’s where he and Jeffrey Scott held their meetings in the early days of the Blue Ridge Conservancy, back when Espresso News was the first and only coffee shop in town. Espresso News is still the only coffee he drinks.
Joey claims “we were the first customers. We heard they were opening a coffee shop in town and we were the first ones there. I find a lot of magic happens in this place.”
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We talked about a lot of things in those first conversations, but he was most keen on returning to was the deer epidemic in the High Country. This is not a joke.
He blames the deer for mowing down the varieties of plants in the region and ultimately for destroying the opportunity for a thick canopy that would inevitably grow if the deer weren’t so abundant.
And this, of course, wouldn’t be a problem if human civilization up here hadn’t driven away the deer’s natural predators–especially the wolves and mountain lions.
But I wanted to first touch on the fascinating simplicity of “the primitive” as Joey sees it.