Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (27 page)

Over the next few days, Mary Snow gave Emma a tour of New York City, of the Empire State Building, Chinatown, and the wharf, as swarms of urbanites buzzed around them. It was a city she had only known before through the newspaper columns of Gallipolis’s native son O. O. McIntyre. He called his daily dispatch “the letter,” and his stories often had the feel of a postcard to the folks back home. He wrote of the telescope man on the curb, the Bowery lodging houses, the drifters, chorus girls, gunmen, the speakeasies on side streets, fake jewelry auction sales, chop houses, antique shops, cafeterias. Now Emma took it all in with her own eyes.

When it was time for her to go, Snow drove her to LaGuardia Airport and put her on a plane for home. She was carrying her walking stick, as always, and as she boarded the plane, the other passengers and crew kept trying to assist her, as if she were crippled.

Going back to the rolling hills of southern Ohio was like a victory tour, as Emma visited family, received phone calls from well-wishing friends, met her seven-month-old great-grandchild for the first time, and gave interviews to the reporters who had learned of her return. She said the people she had met along the trail were “extry nice”—all but the snooty woman who turned her away and the boy who called her a lady tramp.

“I thought it would be fun to walk the trail but I soon found that it was anything but that,” she told one reporter. She explained how she had blown through seven pairs of shoes—four cloth-topped, two made of leather, the last a pair of sneakers—and used a total of
five rolls of adhesive tape, mostly for ankle support. She mentioned how bad the bugs were and explained how she had fixed sassafras leaves in the band of her sunshade, dangling over her ears, to keep the pests off.

“I didn’t get started sooner,” she said, “because when you’re raising a family of 11, you can’t just run off when you want to…. I got to the point where I had time, and I decided, ‘That’ll be a nice lark for me.’”

When a reporter from Baltimore called her a celebrity, she responded: “I wish you people’d stop calling me names.”

Was she afraid?

“If I’d been afraid,” she said, “I never would have started out in the first place.”

It was as though she was made for the moment.

“I slept wherever I could pile down,” she told the local paper. “Course, sometimes they weren’t the most desirable places in the world, but I always managed. A pile of leaves makes a fine bed, and if you’re tired enough, mountain tops, abandoned sheds, porches, and overturned boats can be tolerated. I even had a sleeping companion. A porcupine tried to curl up next to me one night while I slept on a cabin floor. I decided there wasn’t room for both of us.

“Though there were a lot of times I had to parcel out my food to make it last, I didn’t have to break any laws to get it. And when it didn’t last—well, I’ve eaten many a wild berry and chewed on many a sassafras, wintergreen, peppermint, and spearmint leaf.

“What the Lord didn’t provide, I did. One day I was walking down the road and came upon a tin can. I turned it over a couple times with the tip of my cane and found a full, unopened can of beef stew. Opened it with my knife, and dined real well that night.”

She said the trip was the most valuable summer of her life.

“It took me a long time to get to the top,” she said, “and when I did and signed my named on the register, I never felt so alone in my life.”

The grown-up Gatewood children were alarmingly unsurprised that their mother had spent nearly five months in the woods, with rattlesnakes and street gangs, on a mile-high mountain with a sprained ankle and broken glasses. Maybe it’s their stock.

“We didn’t worry about her because she always took care of herself,” Lucy told me, “and she taught us to take care of ourselves.”

“I didn’t know where she was or what she was doing,” said Nelson, “and that was normal.”

“Some people say, ‘Weren’t you worried?’” said Louise. “I said, ‘No, we weren’t worried.’ She knew what she was doing. And if that’s what she wanted to do, more power to her.”

“She was just a normal person,” said Nelson. “Nothing extra.”

“We didn’t know that she had become a kind of celebrity until later,” said Rowena.

“When she came off the trail, she called from Huntington, West Virginia,” said Charles Gatewood, Monroe’s son and Emma’s grandson. “She said, ‘Come get me.’ Dad said, ‘You’ve walked all that way, surely you could walk the rest of the way to Gallipolis.”

“You know, it wasn’t that impressive to me, when she walked the Appalachian Trail the first time,” said their cousin, Tommy Jones, who still lives in the family’s old homestead on the Ohio River. “I think she was sixty-seven, right? Well, I knew how strong she was physically, and how she liked outdoors living. So for her, I didn’t think that was anything exceptional.”

Maybe she didn’t either.

Her celebrity rising, Emma was quickly summoned back to New York to appear on NBC’s
Today
with Dave Garroway, where she
was the featured guest. She walked in range of the cameras from a side door, wearing blue jeans, a checkered jacket, and tennis shoes, and she carried her old sack. In place of her eyeshade she wore a dark beret. She told Garroway and a nationwide audience that she could have walked another thousand miles beyond Katahdin “if necessary.” Garroway asked her why she made the long walk. She said she had always strolled through the hills for pleasure, and when she read the roseate magazine story, she just decided she’d try it.

Afterward, she went to the Empire Hotel to try out for
Welcome Travelers,
a confessional quiz show hosted by “Smilin’” Jack Smith. She earned a spot and they filmed the show the following morning, after several rehearsals. Emma won two hundred dollars—exactly what she spent on the trail. She caught a ride on a sightseeing bus around New York and stopped at an antique shop to buy Mrs. Dean Chase of Millinocket a brass ashtray in the shape of a shoe.

Her next stop was Pittsburgh to visit her daughters, Rowena and Esther. She had barely touched down when the newspapers started calling. A reporter for the
Pittsburgh Press
asked her about her plans for the future.

“That’s a secret,” she said. “But if I go for another hike I’ll let my family know like I did the last time—with postcards.”

She told them all the same thing. “Nobody,” she said, “is going to get out of me what’s going through my head on that score.”

She wouldn’t say so, but she was already thinking about the trail again.

On June 25, 1956, in Washington, DC, the US House of Representatives convened to handle a slate of important business, including the scheduling of a discussion of a postal rate increase and to amend the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949. Ohio
Rep. Thomas A. Jenkins, a Republican from Ironton, addressed Democratic Speaker of the House John William McCormack.

“Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to extend my remarks at this point in the record,” he said.

“Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from Ohio?” McCormack asked. There wasn’t.

“Mr. Speaker,” Jenkins began,

Mrs. Emma Gatewood, a resident of Gallipolis, Ohio, in our congressional district, won for herself national fame a few months ago. In spite of the fact that she was 67 years old and a great-grandmother, she hiked by herself 2,050 miles over rugged mountainous course. She hiked the rough and rugged Appalachian Trail from Fort Oglethorpe, Ga., to the summit of mile-high Mount Katahdin in wild and rugged northeastern Maine.

In performing this great undertaking, she wore out seven pairs of shoes. She carried only a blanket and a small supply of rations. She reached this wild and rugged goal after walking for 146 days. She averaged 17 miles a day and lost 24 pounds of weight. Her accomplishment brought forth many comments from mountain people. One old and experienced Maine woodsman said of her, “We have got to hand it to her. It takes guts, pioneer guts, to do that kind of a job.”

Mrs. Gatewood read about the trail 3 years ago—how well marked it was, that there were shelters at the end of a day’s hike—but she found most of the shelters had been blown down or burned. Much of the time she slept on benches, tables, and on the ground. On bitter cold nights she would heat stones to sleep on.

In places the trail was little more than a path. There were sand and gravel washouts, weeds and brush up to her neck.
But she would not quit. She inched her way over great ledges of shelf rock made slick with sleet, waded across 30-foot-wide mountain streams, whacked with her cane at dense underbrush. She is not afraid of forest animals, although a rattlesnake struck but just got her dungarees.

Mrs. Gatewood is the only woman who ever accomplished this feat. At the top of Mount Katahdin she signed the register and sang “America the Beautiful.” In her own words, she was—

Just walking the trail for pleasure
For the love of out of doors,
For the lovely works our Maker
Displays on forest floors.

In an editorial, the
Boston Post
states that Mrs. Emma Gatewood, of Ohio, demonstrated that the hardihood of pioneer women survives today.

The Millinocket, Maine, Chamber of Commerce presented her with a framed picture of Mount Katahdin when she was its guest. She was also awarded a trophy and a life membership in the National Hikers and Campers Association.

Mrs. Gatewood is a relative of O. O. McIntyre, famed New York columnist, whose syndicated columns covering the United States helped make the city of Gallipolis, Ohio, famous.

By the wonderful performance, Mrs. Emma Gatewood has achieved for herself a place with the heroes of the country.

1957

On April 12, when she was all alone at home, Emma Gatewood quietly sewed a new bag out of a yard of denim—large enough to carry a few items of clothing, gear, first-aid supplies, and food.

On April 16, she babysat her grandchildren, and they did not behave, and she wrote in her diary, “I will be glad when I can get away.”

On April 22, she bought a Timex wristwatch for fourteen dollars and watched a man in the bus station take the screws out of the hinges on a telephone booth with a coin and then walk away.

On April 24, she went to Mrs. Church’s house and sat on the porch for a while with Lannie Thompson’s little girl, then caught a ride with Ms. JaQuay to Northup, then down the road and past the old family homestead, high on the hill, then on up Raccoon Creek to Edith’s place. On the way back, she went to Dr. Allison’s to get
her false teeth, which were ready for pickup, and to Dr. Thomas’s to get a screw for her glasses. Then she packed her suitcase, grabbed her coat, and went up to Monroe’s for the night so she could leave bright and early to catch the bus to Charleston, then the plane to Atlanta, then the bus to Jasper, then the taxi to Mount Oglethorpe.

It had been nineteen months since she stood on Mount Katahdin. She’d had two birthday parties and thousands of those little moments that make a civilized, nice, normal life, of rhubarb pie and dirty dishes, of pot roast and burping babies.

Now, two weeks before Mother’s Day 1957, six months before her seventieth birthday, the Appalachian Trail was calling her back.