Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (16 page)

That night as she dreamed, eight hundred miles to the south, monstrous waves began licking the coast between Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Wilmington, North Carolina. The tide surged five feet, six feet, seven feet—higher than normal—and the ravishing winds began flicking shingles off beach cottages and lifting boards from fishing piers and ripping tree limbs from branches. As the eye of the storm neared land it threw tornadoes across the low country, bouncing around South Carolina tobacco towns such as Conway, Latta, Dillon, and Bucksport, where one cut a swath two hundred
yards wide and a quarter mile long, injuring a woman, her two daughters, and her son. Another twister dropped near Goldsboro, North Carolina, 150 miles north, damaging a tobacco barn and exploding the dwelling occupied by a man, his wife, and their three children, who were not injured.

Along the coast, evacuees by the thousands packed into churches and schools and other structures made of concrete farther inland. Farmers sealed up tobacco barns. Hospitals turned to auxiliary power. The navy secured its battleships. The National Guard evacuated two thousand coastal residents of New Bern, North Carolina, to higher ground. One hundred miles east of Boston, Massachusetts, construction workers were scurrying to sink and secure the massive legs of a radar island.

The storm slowed for a spell off the coast, sucking up moisture, cooling a little, and by the time the eye reached land near Morehead City, North Carolina, it was bursting with one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds and rainfall for the record books. It ripped off roofs and carried houses to sea. It chewed up fishing piers made of steel. And it slowly began to set a new course, turning toward the north, toward New England.

About twelve hundred miles behind the beast, closer to the equator, the winds of the second storm were quickly growing, and observers noticed a large cyclone circulating northeast of the Leeward Islands. They gave it a name: Tropical Storm Diane. A reconnaissance plane flying over the new storm measured steady gusts nearing fifty miles per hour and intensifying.

Rain was falling when Emma woke, trailside, early on August 11. She hiked alone in the morning and was quickly soaked through, head to sneaker. She sloshed across the state line, leaving Massachusetts
behind and entering Vermont on the Long Trail through the Green Mountains, toward the higher and more rugged section of the Appalachians, and the path was made horrible by the rain. Her shoes picked up mud and made walking hard and dangerous at times. In the afternoon she was joined by a pack of Boy Scouts; she didn’t mind the company so she kept pace with the teens. She noticed one of their leaders occasionally watching her walk, as if he were studying the old woman’s gait for lessons. After a while, he spoke up. He complimented Emma on her walking, and said her energy and determination to finish what she had started were admirable. She liked to hear that.

The Boy Scouts broke off and Emma hiked alone for a stretch, the clouds still soaking the earth, finally coming to a shelter near a mountain pond. Two young men, in their early twenties, had already claimed the little cabin for the night. They’d started a fire and were cooking dinner when she walked in, sopping wet. They didn’t seem too happy to see her come along, but it was obvious there was no way she was leaving.

Harold Bell had just gotten out of the navy and Steve Sargent had left the US Naval Academy at Annapolis. They were hiking the Long Trail from Massachusetts to Killington, Vermont, doing some fishing and exploring along the way. They were surprised to see an elderly woman on this rugged, isolated section of trail, but they invited her in and made small talk. The young men were blown away that she had hiked all the way from Georgia, and even more surprised that she was carrying a shoulder sack that weighed less than twenty pounds. For ten days of hiking, the navy boys had each packed fifty-five-pound backpacks, and they felt a little foolish.

When it was time for bed, they hung blankets from the ceiling to divide the room. Like many of those Emma met along the trail, the young men would remember her for the rest of their lives, because of that chance meeting, and even more so because of what would happen a few days later, when they saw her again.

AUGUST 12–13, 1955

That Friday was the rainiest August day in the written history of New York City. And what was left of Hurricane Connie, which made landfall at Morehead, North Carolina, before scraping up the Atlantic Coast, had just begun its onslaught in the Northeast. Ten people in the metropolis already were dead from the floods, a number that would continue to climb. Between midnight Thursday and midnight Friday, Connie dumped nearly six inches of rain on New York. Faced with flooding in various parts of the city, sixty thousand volunteers in New York’s civil defense program were on standby. The headline in the
New York Times
read, C
ONNIE
B
LOWS
N
ORTH WITH
F
ORCE
E
QUAL TO
T
HOUSANDS OF
H-B
OMBS.

Behind the storm was a path of waterlogged destruction. In Wilmington, North Carolina, city hall was flooded by eighteen
inches of water. Near Hampton Roads, Virginia, hurricane winds had slammed two freighters together. Seventy Red Cross shelters in the Carolinas held 14,756 refugees. Much of the tobacco and corn crop had been ruined.

At North Beach, Maryland, a young woman staggered out of the choppy Chesapeake Bay and collapsed on shore, and locals sounded an alarm. Wreckage from a sixty-four-year-old schooner called the
Levin J. Marvel,
which had been carrying tourists on a cruise, began to wash up. By the end of the day, a coroner had laid out ten bodies, still wearing life preservers, at the North Beach fire station.

Behind Connie, too, was another storm. In the darkness between August 11 and 12, the season’s fourth hurricane curved abruptly to the northeast and picked up speed. The intensification was so rapid that overnight the winds increased from 50 miles per hour to 125 miles per hour.

The rain bands north of Connie covered virtually all of New England, dropping eight inches of rain on Connecticut in just two days. To the north, the rain running off the Green Mountains and White Mountains rapidly filled brooks and streams, which began to crest their banks and picked up velocity as they flowed downhill and fed into larger creeks and rivers.

Two hundred miles north of soaked New York City, Emma woke in a cabin in the woods, happy to have dry clothes thanks to the little fire. The navy boys were planning on sticking around the cabin to do some fishing, so she bade them good-bye and headed down the trail in a light rain. In the daybreak she could see that the nearby pond had swollen during the night and was pouring out over the trail. A wooden bridge across the stream was now a series of floating logs and she got her feet wet immediately while trying to get across. She wore a plastic cape around her shoulders but soon realized it was no use trying to stay dry. Minutes into her hike her clothes were soaked, and the wetter her sack got, the heavier her haul.

She had heard about a nice, well-kept shelter on Bromley Mountain, and for most of the hike she fantasized about getting out of the rain, drying her clothes, and having a hot bite to eat. In the late afternoon, when she came into a clearing and saw the shelter, Emma stopped in her tracks and gaped. Even from the outside, it appeared to be the most down-at-the-heels place she could imagine. To begin with, the lodge was abandoned. The doors were off their hinges and the windows had been broken out. When she stepped inside, rain was pouring through holes in the roof. Porcupines had eaten big chunks out of the wood floors. The stove was unusable.

She hung her wet clothes on an old ladder and stretched it over a fireplace. She got a fire going to dry out her things, but everything was so wet that she couldn’t build enough heat. Disappointed though she was, she made the best of her surroundings. The water pouring in from a big hole in the roof made a decent stream in which she washed her clothes. Her sleep was intermittent. She couldn’t keep dry in bed that night, due to the leaks.

In July 1939, P. C. Gatewood sold his second farm and announced to his family that they were moving to Barkers Ridge, West Virginia, where he had bought an even smaller patch of land on which he hoped to grow tobacco. The farm was in disrepair and the fences needed work, but a log cabin sat on the property and there was room for a few sheep. Emma did not want to leave Ohio, but there was no use in fighting. So they packed their things into the truck and moved across the river, eighteen miles east of Huntington. She cried quietly the whole way.

The three children still living at home—Nelson, fifteen; Louise, thirteen; and Lucy, eleven—enrolled in school, and Emma got a job as a government monitor, her role to make certain no farmer
planted more tobacco than he was allowed. She tried to make the best of her new life. She braided rugs and planted vegetables and found time to write poetry, rhymes that seemed to be longing for a better situation. She mailed back one untitled poem to her home newspaper in Gallipolis, which published it.

A home is made of many things,

Books and papers and little strings,

A comb and brush to fix one’s hair,

A mending basket, and easy chair.

A clock, some music, the Sacred Book,

A kitchen stove and food to cook.

The sound of little feet about

Up the stairs, and in and out.

Little trinkets on the floor,

Trains and cars and dolls galore.

Children’s clothes and children’s beds,

A kitty cat that must be fed.

A dog to warn us with his bark,

When someone bothers when it’s dark.

A mother that is kind and good,

And patient with her little brood.

A great big place must Father fill,

Besides the paying of the bills.

A Spirit there that brings together,

In every trial and kind of weather.

There must be kindness every day,

If it’s a home with shining ray.

P.C. burned a mountain field and planted a small crop. Each Saturday morning, P.C. would leave with Armster Kingery and would not return until Sunday evening. His wife never asked him where he had been because she did not care.

It was on a Sunday in early September 1939 that Emma Gatewood received her last beating at the hands of her husband. It was then that her endurance of his cruelty ended.

The details can’t be found in the various biographical sketches that accompanied the honors bestowed upon her in later years. They are not found in any newspaper article or magazine story about her either, and there are hundreds. In fact, the woman who did not smoke or drink or curse would tell newspaper reporters she was a widow for years to come, even if P. C. Gatewood was alive and well in Ohio. The details of this dark time were kept by her family, and they did not speak often of it for many years.

That September day, P.C. and Emma got into an argument that developed into their final fight. No one remembers what subject prompted the disagreement, and there is naturally some confusion about the order of events. What is known is that Nelson, fifteen, found his father assaulting his mother inside the home. He had beaten her in the face, which was swollen and bruised. Her upper and lower teeth were broken. Her left ear was black and a mole above her ear was ripped nearly off. One of her ribs was cracked.

Nelson, who had always been small for his age but was nearing 150 pounds of bone and muscle, grabbed his father, pinning P.C.’s arms to his sides, and lifted him off the floor. He told his mother to run and she did, out the front door and into the woods. Nelson held his father for a few more seconds, then released him, and P.C. ran in pursuit of his wife. When he couldn’t find her, he returned and walked past Nelson to the stove, where he picked up an iron poker and raised it over his head.

Make your first swing a good one,
Nelson told his father.
You’re only going to get one.

The old man didn’t swing.