Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail

by Montgomery, Ben

  Her feet themselves were wide and flat and covered with veins like the lines on a map, and they ran shapelessly into oversized ankles, then up to narrow, battered, hourglass-curved shins and toward grotesque, gibbous knees surrounded by unnatural, tumorous outthrusts.

  Hers were well-worn legs and she hid her feet inside sneakers and her knees inside dungarees, both of which were getting wetter by the minute. She made her way along the rugged trail in a late-June downpour, over the Priest, elevation 4,063 feet, one of the highest gains in Virginia. She tramped down across the foaming cascades of the Tye River, and on to Reeds Gap, where she lost her rain hat. She walked back a piece to find it but had no luck. She was soaked to the bone by the time she found a man milking a cow beside the trail. His name was Campbell and she asked about a place to stay. He invited her back to his house, which was way down over a hill from the trail. The woman of the house, Sis Campbell, was in her eighties, and the house looked much older than her, and its furnishings seemed to have been original. Sis Campbell led Emma upstairs by candlelight, as the old home had no electricity.

  The next morning was beautiful and she walked north through central Virginia. Some passersby mentioned a restaurant, a Howard Johnson’s, in the vicinity of Waynesboro to the north, and she spent much of the day’s hike thinking about hot food. She stopped at the first house to ask for directions. The family, Mr. and Mrs. E. B. Ricks, were very nice and invited her in to rest. Their home was lovely. They had a flagstone courtyard and the prettiest view of the valley Emma could imagine. They were taken by her stories and asked Emma to stay for supper. Mrs. Ricks in particular wouldn’t stop with the questions. After Emma went to bed, she phoned the News Virginian of Waynesboro.

  The next morning, they drove Emma the few miles into town. She had breakfast at a restaurant, then went to the drugstore for a few items, then headed across the street and waited for another store to open so she could buy a new pair of slacks, a raincoat, and some new shoes. She had just started to shop when a man saw her and hurried toward her, grinning ear to ear.

  I’m from the newspaper, he said.

  They’d found her again. The reporter had phoned Mrs. Ricks and she told him that Emma was in the store shopping for shoes. Emma didn’t mind so much this time. Word was out, after all. She answered all the man’s questions.

  Emma told him about her pack, how she had made it herself. He held it and figured it weighed about twelve pounds when full. He asked her how she had stayed warm on cold nights with no sleeping bag. She told him about heating flat rocks over a fire and reclining on them for warmth. She told him she couldn’t sleep many nights for fear of bears. She hadn’t seen one yet, but she’d seen plenty of signs they were around. She told him about the rattlesnake and that there weren’t enough shelters along the trail and that she thought she’d finish by late September, “depending on how well I get along.”

  She told him about the trail magic, and how welcoming some folks had been. “I have found a lot of lovely people who have taken me in for a night’s lodging and food,” she said. “I have also found some who didn’t care to have me around.”

  He asked her impressions so far, and she couldn’t help herself. That National Geographic article made the journey seem so easy. “I have found the hike more rugged than I had heard,” she said.

  When the interview was over, she bought a raincoat, shoes, socks, and some food and headed off again toward the trail, then toward Sawmill Shelter. That afternoon, the story ran on the front page of the News Virginian, beneath the fold, under the headline: WOMAN, 67, HIKING FROM GEORGIA TO MAINE, ARRIVES IN WAYNESBORO.

  Many persons take to the easy chair when they reach the age of three score and seven years.

  But this is not the case for Mrs. Emma Gatewood, of Gallipolis, Ohio.

  Mrs. Gatewood, the mother of 11 children whose ages range from 27 to 47, on May 3 began to hike the [2,050] mile long Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine.

  Since May 3, the 67-year-old woman has hiked 900 miles.

  The reporter asked Emma if she’d like for him to mail a clipping of his piece to her family in Ohio, three hundred miles due west of the spot where she was standing.

  “The folks at home,” she said, “don’t know where I am.”

  She could hide in the woods. Always.

  “I’ve always done a lot of walking in the woods,” she’d tell a newspaper reporter years later. “The stillness and quiet of the forests has always seemed so wonderful and I like the peacefulness.”

  Some people thought she was crazy, but she found a certain restfulness that satisfied her nature. The woods made her feel more contented. She was comfortable there, especially when her home was ruled by a tyrant. In later years, she would confide in her children that their father not only blacked her eyes and bloodied her lips but that his sexual appetite was insatiable. He demanded she submit to him several times a day. They didn’t know it then, but they were used to their mother seeking haven in their beds, in the quiet of night, because she couldn’t bear to lie next to him.

  The children saw what he did to her, and they’d carry the memories into their old age. The muffled noises that pierced the night. The bruises on her face. The trajectory of her waning patience. Rowena, the fifth born, would always remember her mother silhouetted in an upstairs window, looking out, when a hand grabbed her hair and cast her to the floor. She would remember screaming, and her older sister slapping her face to make her stop. Louise would remember her father telling her mother she was crazy and punching her in the face with his fist. Lucy, the youngest, would remember hearing a cry and running upstairs to find her father on top of her mother, his hands around her throat, her face turning black. Nelson would remember finding his father beating his mother, and lifting his father off of her long enough for her to run away, into the woods.

  They’d carry the whispers with them: That he spent his money—their money—fulfilling his desires on Two Street in Huntington, West Virginia. That he had convinced the neighbors that his wife’s complaints were the complaints of an insane person. Even when he broke a broom over her head, he could convince others that he really loved her.

  “Multiple times I was black and blue in a lot of places, but mostly my face,” she wrote later. “I did not carry one single child that I did not get a slapping or beating during that time and several times he put me outside and told me to go. It was one grand nightmare to live with him with his maniacal temper. He would act so innocent and pretend he had not touched me and say I was not in my right mind and they would have to do something with me. He even asked me what asylum I wanted to go to and I told him Athens or O.H.E. or any place would be better than home.”

  She sometimes fought back, which was also part of her nature. And she could hold her own. One story would be told for years to come.

  Emma and P.C. were fighting, and the farmhands were working outside. She bolted out of the house and ran around behind a wagon full of corn and scrambled up onto the produce. P.C. came out right behind her, with purpose, and he grabbed a hoe that was leaning against the house. One of the hands stopped him.

  “You’re gonna kill her,” he said.

  “Let him alone,” Emma shouted. “This is our fight.”

  As their relationship deteriorated, their financial difficulties were multiplying. P.C. wrote to his well-heeled cousin, Maybelle McIntyre, in 1935, asking for a loan to save the farm, but she would not lend him money. “Can’t the farm board which has such things in hand do something about it?” she wrote. P.C. shared pieces of his domestic troubles with his cousin, who lived in New York and was married to O. O. McIntyre, one of the most famous writers of the time, whose “New York Day by Day” columns ran in some five hundred newspapers. Maybelle hired P.C. in 1937 to renovate her home in Gallipolis, and when he went over the budget she had outlined, he blamed the conflicts at home.

  “Naturally you must know I am very sympathetic with your domestic troubles,” Maybelle responded in November 1937
, “but sorry as I am it just must not enter into this business deal. If you are too troubled to get down to the reports, some one must get them to me. That is business nothing else.” Three weeks later, he had paid the bills and made amends. “I feel sure if you had not had your troubles at home you would have made the reports as you went along and there would have been no worry on either side,” Maybelle wrote. “However I am glad it is over and I hope your affairs there will soon clear up.”

  They did not clear up.

  Through it all, the woods were Emma’s respite. Sometimes she’d walk away and be gone all day, or long enough, at least, for his mood to shift. The forest inspired her. She wrote poetry about springtime, about the rills frolicking and zephyrs gently swaying, about the bloodroot and windflower and the hepaticas deep within the forest. She wrote of the Ohio River bends and a romantic tugboat landing. She wrote of Christmastime, and of being alone. Some of her poetry was dark and seemed to speak to how she was feeling about her relationship.

  She got her man, she has him roped

  His tongue hangs out as though he’s choked

  She’s sorta scared, her hair’s a wreck

  She has her foot right on his neck

  Dames get desperate in times like these

  When men are scarce and hard to please

  This was her lot, and she could manage, until she felt she could not. He had been so cruel she didn’t know whether she’d survive another beating. As the winter of 1937 set in, she told the children who were still living at home that she loved them and would send for them. She gave the older children instructions to take care of the younger ones, and she told them to always look out for each other. And then she slipped away.

  The trail through the beautiful Shenandoah National Park in Virginia was good, its long, gentle ascents not nearly as taxing as the previous thousand miles of mountains. The weather was even better. She put in twenty-one miles on June 28, and twenty on June 29, fueled primarily by wild black raspberries, and on June 30, after a good morning hike and a lunch at the Big Meadows Lodge, she bumped into a Boy Scout troop at a nearby campground. When the boys learned where she had been and what she was doing they wanted her picture and autograph and she obliged. She felt a little like a celebrity.

  She found shelter on Hawksbill Mountain and caught some sleep, despite the black flies that pestered her through the night.

  She started at 5:30 AM the next day and was making good time through the narrow, one-hundred-mile-long park. The trail often ran alongside old stone field walls and Emma pictured someone riding in a carriage behind four horses.

  These hills had been home to Native Americans for thousands of years before European settlers began encroaching from the east, which started soon after an expedition crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains in the early 1700s. Many of the settlers came from Pennsylvania and staked out farms in the lowlands, and as prime property grew scarce they moved up into the mountains, clearing the land, hunting and trapping game and raising livestock. They made a life for themselves there for hundreds of years until the 1920s, when academics began to explore the social “problems” of the region: illiteracy, poverty, illegitimacy, sanitation.

  Grand plans were launched to move the people off the mountains, pave the ridge, and transform the land into something tourists from eastern cities might enjoy riding through. In 1926 Congress authorized the establishment of Shenandoah National Park and the state began acquiring land, at times forcing people to move against their will. In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps began building stone bridges, shelters, and lodges, and their handiwork was something to behold. The park was opened that year, and what once were pastures soon blossomed with the makings of what would become a mature wilderness.

  Emma laid eyes on Skyland, a mountain resort opened in the 1890s by a gregarious businessman with a showman’s flair, who invited city dwellers to get away from their urbanized, mechanized lives. The private resort had since been taken over by the park, but its lodges, which seemed to her to be made of bark, remained open to guests. She trudged on toward Maryland at a good clip, and on July 4, not far from Ashby Gap, she found three dollars beside the road. It was getting dark, so she used the lucky bills to get a room at a motel and ate five pieces of fried chicken—a feast.

  She crossed, finally, into Maryland, into a tiny town called Sandy Hook, which was just a smattering of houses alongside the railroad tracks, not far from the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. She introduced herself to Anna Fleming, who invited Emma to stay the night. That evening around dusk, she hiked up to Maryland Heights and sat on a cliff looking down upon the picturesque little town of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. One hundred seventy years before, Thomas Jefferson called the view “one of the most stupendous scenes in nature.” In a book first published in France, he wrote that the scene alone, the passage of the Potomac River through the Blue Ridge and its crashing merger with the Shenandoah, was worth a trip across the Atlantic.

  The town below her breathed history, from the narrow brick streets and proud little buildings to the church spires and hilltop cemetery. It was the place the abolitionist John Brown believed he could spark a revolution, to turn the tide of slavery in the South and redeem an oppressed people down the barrel of a Sharps carbine. The state of Virginia hanged him for treason. His raid, though, was a catalyst for the Civil War, during which Harpers Ferry changed hands eight times in battles, the last of which came ninety-one years to the day before Emma sat upon her cliff. It was, as both sides knew, a portal to invasion. And later still, it was the place where W. E. B. Du Bois and his peers launched the Niagara Movement, which would become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

  So much change and inhumanity for one little place. So much bloodshed and cleansing, death and rebirth.

  “The scene was beautiful,” she wrote in her journal. Then, on the day after Independence Day, she stood to her feet and walked back down the trail.

  7

  LADY TRAMP

  JULY 6–15, 1955

  She could not find the trail.

  Someone had told her it ran through Harpers Ferry, so she followed a road out of Sandy Hook, Maryland, and crossed the Potomac River on a railroad bridge into town. She saw old trail blazes on telephone poles near St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church, but no trail. She hiked up to a cliff looking for signs until evening, when she came back into Sandy Hook. A man there told her the trail had been rerouted, and she set off in the other direction, along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, making it to Weverton, just two miles away, by nightfall.

  She hiked through Washington Monument State Park the next day, where the first monument to George Washington was built in 1827, and where, in the evening, she met a fire warden who invited her to sleep on a cot in his living room. He called the newspaper in Boonsboro and put Emma on the phone and here she sat, for the third time in seventeen days, answering questions she never intended to answer. It wasn’t that they bothered her, but she didn’t fully comprehend what the fuss was about.

  The next day, as she tramped through Pen Mar Park and toward the Mason-Dixon Line, a brief dispatch from the AP was rolling off newspaper presses and being banded and loaded into bags and milk crates and onto the bicycles of boys and girls who would sling them onto the lawns and porches of hundreds of thousands of homes across the country. And as Emma hunkered down that night in a lean-to, Americans far and wide were reading the details of the long, lonely, improbable walk of a complete stranger.

  BOONSBORO, MD., JULY 8 - (AP) - After 66 days and nearly 1000 miles, Mrs. Emma Gatewood is still pretty determined to become the first woman ever to hike the 2050-mile Appalachian Trail alone—even if she is 67.

  The Gallipolis, Ohio, mother of 11 and grandmother of 23 emphasized this yesterday as she paused at the nearby Washington Monument State Park. At the rate she’s going, Grandma Emma should make it to Mt. Katahdin, Me., sometime in September. She left the Mt. Oglethorpe, Ga., starting po
int, May 3.

  Lugging a pack of about 35 pounds and spending the nights in her sleeping bag or some of the lean-to shelters along the way, she has worn out two pairs of shoes but none of her enthusiasm.

  “I’m a great lover of the outdoors,” she explained.

  They got most of it right. The pack was lighter than thirty-five pounds, and she wasn’t carrying a sleeping bag. And the way the hike was going, she’d be lucky to make it to Mount Katahdin by September, if she made it at all. The hardest part of the trail was ahead of her. Her celebrity was rising. More and more folks wanted her to stop and chat. Not to mention the unpredictable weather.

  In the Northwest, the summer of 1955 was shaping up to be the coldest and soggiest in years. Hay was mildewing in fields and strawberries had been stunted. But Chicago was on pace to have the hottest July on record since 1871, the year before the Great Fire. Drought plagued much of the Northeast. New York had put in an appeal to the federal government for drought aid. Meanwhile, Texas was so wet the farmers had stopped talking of pulling out of the Dust Bowl. Stranger still was a rare winter storm, which had formed on New Year’s Eve and developed into Hurricane Alice on January 1 before dissipating a few days later. Historians in Puerto Rico had argued about whether it was the first winter storm of its kind. They remembered a similar storm in 1816 but couldn’t decide whether it had formed in September or January. Either way, the storm had meteorologists baffled. “Possibly this may be another consequence of the general warming observed during the past several decades,” wrote one National Weather Bureau meteorologist.

  By the end of the year, the Weather Bureau would chart thirteen tropical storms, and would note that ten of those attained hurricane force, a number that had been exceeded only once before. They’d call the hurricane season of ’55 the “most disastrous in history,” and note that it “broke all previous records for damage.” They’d hypothesize that in July, as Emma Gatewood hiked north through Maryland unaware, a planetary wave had formed over the North Atlantic and evolved like a tropical storm, and that at the ridge of the Azores, upper level anticyclone circulation thrust strongly northeastward into Europe and introduced a northeasterly flow that, through vorticity flux, produced an anomalously sharp and deep trough extending along the Spanish and African coasts. And at the base of that trough, they’d write, its genesis encouraged by the injection of cyclonic vorticity from the north and associated vertical destabilization, another storm would be born.