How it began

For my sixth birthday, my grandma bought me a subscription to National Geographic: Kids. Before bed every night, my dad used to let me read one story from my magazine aloud. My favorite stories were those about the sea—I loved learning about exotic marine animals, tales of fishermen who worked on the waterfront in tumultuous storms to earn a living, and faraway places that didn’t even sound like they could exist in the same world as the rural Michigan town I grew up in. I read those stories each night, flipped through the glossy photographs, and dreamed that maybe, one day, I would get to travel to some of those places, meet those fascinating people, and take those pictures myself.

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My love for oysters dates all the way back to my very first job in high school. I worked as a hostess at a little neighborhood seafood joint. My mom got me the job because she was afraid I was “too introverted,” and thought it would be a good way to get me “out of my shell.” (Hey, this is an oyster blog). One of my job duties was to help get the raw bar ready for dinner service every night. I would go into the restaurant basement, grab a bucket of ice, and carefully dump it into the decorative marble trough next to our bar. I would then help our bartender carefully place the night’s selection of oysters in the crushed ice, and always ensure the prettiest shells were out front for the patrons to see.

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I spent my early twenties working as a litigation attorney in a large Michigan law firm. While the work was intriguing, the hours were grueling. I spent summers, holidays, and nights in my office, alone, hunched over my computer churning out work. Those places and those dreams I had as a kid growing up reading stories with my dad, and learning about oysters from bartenders, slipped away from me.

One day—I had enough.

I booked a flight to Portland, and started a week-long road trip up and down the coast of Maine with my cousin. It was the first time in over four years that I used my camera. I did anything and everything imaginable, from eating clam chowder in the rain in Camden to sipping tea on a sailboat that slipped through the fog in Southwestern Harbor. And then I had Maine oysters – real Maine oysters from Maine. The taste was unlike anything I ever experienced in Michigan, the brine and the sweetness and the earthiness were so satiating and so unbelievably fresh. And there were so many kinds of oysters. I was determined to try them all.

One night, when I was sitting in a bar in Belfast with my cousin, I told her I was going to stay in Maine. She laughed nervously, because a part of her knew I was serious.

On the one-year anniversary from that night in the Belfast bar, I quit my litigation job, packed up my car, and I moved to Maine. 

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The Briny Babe is a combination of all the passions I have built up in my life. From my early childhood dream of traveling along the seacoast, camera in hand, learning about how people worked the waterfront for a living, to my time spent in restaurants, interacting with patrons eager to learn about bivalves, this is a melding of so many of my interests.

Thank you so much for taking the time to share in my oyster adventures. I hope I can inspire you to go on some of your own.

Jacqueline