I’m a pro lurker and a professional lurker; I’m good at it and I get paid to do it.
You won’t see me on Reddit leading discussions about Memphis’ insane drivers or keyboard-bombing the mayor’s Facebook page. But I’m there, probably.
The Memphis Flyer started MEMernet in 2019. It replaced the iconic “Fly On the Wall” column that could not exist without the inimitable Chris Davis. He retired. I scrambled to fill the news hole and MEMernet was born (named by our own Shara Clark).
The column captures the best of Memphians living their lives online. I love the funny stuff, the weird stuff, the intriguing stuff, the sad stuff, and everything in between.
But what I really love is when MEMphians find each other online and do stuff IRL. Love and/or sex, maybe. But definitely hooking up on their interests. There’s no better/easier place for this (imho) than Facebook Groups. Search “Memphis” in Groups and you’ll find real estate agents, gear heads, foodies, fishing folks, film fans, and entrepreneurs.
MEMernet IRL will be an occasional series of meeting up with some of the city’s finest, funniest, and most-interesting digital citizens. — Toby Sells
I’d been lurking on the Memphis Mushroom Foragers Facebook Group (1,900+ members) for a while. In the group, there’s a lot of mushroom identification going on. Basically, people head out into the woods, see a mushroom, photograph it, post it to the group, and (usually) ask, “What is this mushroom?”
For a long time, I wondered how cool it would be to hit the woods with these folks. Last week, I acted. One comment in the group and two texts later, I was standing in a parking lot at Shelby Forest shaking hands with the group’s founder, Kevin Lewis.
He told me he’d be hard to miss and he was right. A long, brown-and-gray beard spilled down to his chest under clear gray eyes and a black cowboy hat. A keyring jangled from his blue Levi’s that ended over a pair of black, square-toed cowboy boots, scuffed from miles of mushroom hunting, apparently.
I suggested looking around Overton Park, but Lewis was adamant about Shelby Forest and for good reason. A place can be over-foraged, he said, and that’s not good for people or for mushrooms. My mushroom education had begun even before I shut my car door.
He grabbed a large wicker basket — what looked like an Easter basket — from his car and laid several small brown bags at the bottom of it. The first fall chill cooled the air and I zipped my hoodie all the way up for the first time since April. As we walked, Lewis said he started the Facebook page a couple of years ago.
“I couldn’t find anybody to help me when I got started [mushroom foraging],” he said. “So, I started the page so I could help others, a place they could find some resources to get them started.”
The fact that his mushroom group has so many members “blows me away” and he said those members are from all over the country and the world. The page has earned him invitations to speak at events, including the recent Memphis Mushroom Festival.
Past the trailhead sign, Lewis and I walk and talk down the comfortable trail. He’s behind me. So, I can’t see his eyes darting to both sides, expertly tracking spots for Memphis-area mushrooms to hide. I tell him I’m a willing-but-unseasoned outdoorsman and asked if it’s okay to eat mushrooms you see in the woods. Lesson No. 1: “Before you eat any mushroom, the very first thing you need to do is to identify it 100 percent,” Lewis said. “You don’t want to be eating something that you don’t know what it is, which is the same with any plant, also.”
But mushroom foraging, to Lewis, is more about the finding, the discovery. While you can eat some mushrooms, the art is really in the challenge of finding new species and cataloging them — almost like birdwatching — and just being out in nature.
I start to ask another question and he pauses, silencing the crunch of autumn leaves under his boots.
“We got some turkey tail [mushrooms] right here,” he said, pointing at the end of log. “Nope. My bad.”
Then, he said, “This is …” and rattled off the Latin name of what he’d actually found. I swore to myself then that I’d look up the term later. Despite my 7th-grade biology education, I could not find the name.
Maybe that’s the thing I loved about Lewis, what made him so Memphis. He looks like a mushroom forager — the beard, hat, and boots, maybe — and his casual conversation style makes him sound like one, too. (He imparts knowledge to me on our hike in little anecdotes, doing all the different voices and sound effects.) But he can rattle off a mushroom’s binomial nomenclature (thanks 7th grade) like his favorite song lyrics. Memphians, like Lewis, let folks know you care before you show them how much you know, and do it with style.
Down a bank, I spy some yellow, mushroom-looking … things at the base of downed tree. Lewis skids down to them, calls them “butter mushrooms,” flicks open his grandpa’s old knife, and harvests five or six golden stems and caps. (Lewis explained to me earlier in the day that what most call “mushrooms” are really just the sex organs of mushrooms, which live inside trees or under ground.)
After 30 minutes in, I knew I had too much information for this story, too much mushroom information to pack in for sure. We turn for the parking lot. On the way out, we pass the couple of ladies and their dog which we passed on the way in. (One of them pressed Lewis for mushroom IDs from pictures on her phone for a full five minutes.) Lewis shows them our haul in his basket and tells them to join the Facebook Group and to post their mushroom pictures there.
For all of it — mushrooms or anything else — humans are sometimes at their best, Lewis said, when they’re sharing information with each other, helping each other out with experience and knowledge. For him, that’s what the Memphis Mushroom Forager’s Facebook Group is all about.