Alewife

Long before I knew an alewife was a sort of fish, I used to puzzle over the term. When I was in college at Tufts, the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA - the beloved/reviled "T" for short) was completing the Red Line extension. The northern end of the subway line was to be "Alewife", a short distance from campus. The other terminus of the Red Line subway, far to the south of Boston, was in "Braintree". We felt somehow trodden upon. These names are wretched, we thought, and they'd be marking the fronts of our trains for our entire college careers - Inbound to Braintree, Outbound to Alewife. We felt we deserved rail stops with names like "Winchester Common" or "Pembroke" or "Flintlock" - something to evoke the deep sense of history one finds in college brochures.

I remember sitting around in a bullshit session, procrastinating against some test or term paper, discussing this with friends. We anthropomorhized the term alewife, picturing her as a rotund, disheveled and drunken, Industrial Revolution era woman with her hair tied back in a bandana and crooked toothed smile with gaps, spouting ribald insults. We developed an alternate vision as well. What if she was the long-suffering wife of the drunken n'ere-do-well, rather like the tough Yankee version of Andy Capp's wife? Poor alewife. Maybe she just served ale to the local farmers once upon a time, secretly on Sundays? Maybe her shack and brewing shed had once stood by the now trash strewn drainage wetland and the end of Route 2? The place had become known as Alewife in her honor, long after her death. I pictured the colonial era wagon tracks and a ducky pond of two hundred years ago being where the concrete, rebar, overgrown culverts and heavily travelled rotaries are now - the place where the main road from the Berkshires met the outmost edge of the skein of farm tracks radiating out from the "Hub" of Boston.

All this is certainly better than a fish. And how did the fish get this name? I'll have to check the OED. Indeed, in proper English speech the alewife is a woman who keeps an ale house - Shakespeare uses the term in Taming of the Shrew. Our American usage for the fish (related to a herring), probably comes from comparison of the large belly, according to our cousins at Oxford. But here I think the bulging eyes and gaping fishmouth might also have something to do with the look of dissipation of the terminal drunkard. We're all on the same track, I guess.

Fast Forward - present, or close enough. We drove into Cambridge on a gray, but not particularly chill Sunday, and parked at Alewife station. More to come. . .