Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (11 page)

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.

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 point, 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.

Emma Gatewood knew none of this. Her world was insular, the trees and flowers and animals and elements. She drifted to sleep that night in a lean-to beside the trail.

The boys came, three of them, around midnight to camp at the shelter, and when they discovered an old woman inside, they turned to leave. Emma invited them back, told them there was plenty of room and she didn’t mind at all to share the space. She left them
sleeping the next morning and made good time across the state line into Pennsylvania, nearing Caledonia State Park, in a valley between Blue Mountain and South Mountain, land once owned by Thaddeus Stevens. She’d be in Pennsylvania for another 230 miles. She washed out some clothes and dried them by a fire and slept some before setting off again.

She was climbing up the steep south bank of Chinquapin Hill when she heard something unnatural. She swung around and caught sight of a man who was huffing and puffing up the slope behind her. His hair fell in his eyes and he was having a hard time with the climb, but it seemed he wanted to catch up. Figuring he was a reporter, she stopped.