Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (5 page)

They celebrated with a large dinner, then rode in a covered buggy up the Ohio River to Gallipolis and out to her mother’s place above Northup, where they spent their honeymoon night in a room fashioned out of bedsheets, before heading up to the little log cabin he owned on a hillside above Sugar Creek.

It wasn’t long before the honeymoon was over. P.C. began treating Emma as a possession, demanding she do his work. Mopping, building fences, burning tobacco beds, mixing cement. It wasn’t what she had in mind, but she tried hard to make the best of it.

They were married three months before he drew blood.

Standing Indian Mountain jutted from the earth nearly a mile, the highest point on the trail south of the Great Smokies. Emma, after a full day of rest and a good night’s sleep on a bed of hay in the
lean-to, saying farewell to the men and pigs, and having a breakfast of leftover potato cakes, pushed forward, canvas Ked in front of canvas Ked, until she crested the mountain in the mid-morning.

P.C. and Emma Gatewood, shortly after their marriage.
Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds

The mountain was named by the Cherokee, who told of a great winged creature that made its home here. A bolt of lightning shattered the mountain and killed the creature, but it also struck a warrior, who was turned to stone. The mountain was named on account
of a peculiar rock formation that used to jut from the bald precipice and looked very much like a man.

It took her an hour and a half to ascend, and behind her was a superb view of the Georgia Blue Ridge Mountains from which she’d come, through Deep Gap and Muskrat Creek and Sassafras Gap and Bly Gap. She needed to doctor her feet, but it was too early to stop, and even without a map she knew the toughest part of the journey so far was just ahead of her.

After a long trek through Beech Gap and Betty Creek Gap she began to climb Mount Albert, scrambling much of the way over steep rocks, and it was indeed the hardest climb yet in the thirteen days she’d been hiking.

That evening, after twenty miles of walking, she ventured two miles off the trail to find a place to stay. She discovered an empty lean-to at White Oak Forest Camp. The night was cold and she tried to build a fire, but her matches were wet and would not strike. She squirmed into a corner of the shelter and shivered under the blanket until she fell asleep.

She was greeted by rain the next morning, so rather than set off she walked to the game warden’s house and introduced herself. The warden’s name was Waldroop, and he and his wife drove Emma two miles back to the trail on their way to town. She started off slow, rain falling all day, and she arrived at Wayah Camp at 4:00
PM
and built a small fire to dry her clothes. The nearest lean-to had an earthen floor, which was cold, so she heated a long board over the fire and rested atop it for warmth. When the board cooled, she did it again.

She left ten minutes after six the next morning, greeted by the early birds of the Nantahala—a Cherokee word meaning “land of the noonday sun”—a vast and dark forest visited by Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto in the sixteenth century and the naturalist William Bartram in the eighteenth. When Bartram came
through, he “beheld with rapture and astonishment a sublimely awful scene of power and magnificence, a world of mountains piled upon mountains.” He continued:

The mighty cloud now expands its sable wings, extending from North to South, and is driven irresistibly on by the tumultuous winds, spreading his livid wings around the gloomy concave, armed with terrors of thunder and fiery shafts of lightning; now the lofty forests bend low beneath its fury, their limbs and wavy boughs are tossed about and catch hold of each other; the mountains tremble and seem to reel about, and the ancient hills to be shaken to their foundation: the furious storm sweeps along, smoking through the vale and descending from the firmament, and I am deafened by the din of thunder; the tempestuous scene damps my spirits, and my horse sinks under me at the tremendous peals, as I hasten for the plains.

Here walked a new pioneer, her swollen feet inside worn-out tennis shoes, climbing up to Wayah Bald, and up the steps of a stone fire tower built twenty years before by the Civilian Conservation Corps, spinning now, absorbing the breathtaking views of the surrounding range, the world of mountains piled upon mountains, alone, happy.

MAY 19–31, 1955

The hiking past Wayah Bald was difficult. The trail was unkempt and not well marked. By the time she crossed the Nantahala River on a railroad bridge she was growing hungry, but her supplies were gone. She ventured off the trail and found a small sassafras tree in the forest. She picked the tender young leaves from the tips of its branches and made a salad. Nearby, she found a bunch of wild strawberries. They were tart, but nice.

The path to Wesser Bald had been washed out by the creek and the muck made walking difficult. She stopped at a little trailside store to restock, buying a quart of milk, some cheese crackers, fig bars, two eggs, and a pocketknife. She’d lost her old knife somewhere along the trail.

The next morning, she began her ascent of Swim Bald, which took about three and a half hours, but just before she reached the top, she slipped on a slick boulder, fell, and broke her walking cane. She picked herself up off the rock and checked to see if everything was in order. It was, and she pressed on. She found a new walking stick and crested Cheoah Bald by 10:30 A
M.
She came down through Locust Cove Gap and Simp Gap and Stecoah Gap and Sweetwater Gap and, growing tired, looked for a place to sleep. There were no shelters, and a tall mountain loomed before her. The sun was fading, so she found a bare spot along the trail, built a fire, and settled in to rest for the night.

She was surrounded by unfamiliar territory, alone in a foreign place, full of curiosity and also dread and fear of the unknown. She hadn’t seen another soul on the trail since the men, days before. Most of her routine had been set in the deep solitude of a southern spring, surrounded by a nature very much alive, by chirping birds and buzzing insects, but uninterrupted by human activity. That was about to change.

The stretch of fertile farmland along the Ohio River in Gallia County was dotted by white wooden houses built snug against the hillsides, the occasional tin-roofed barn beckoning you to C
HEW
M
AIL
P
OUCH
T
OBACCO
. People marked time here by floods and snowstorms, and they kept track of their lineage on the front pages of their Holy Bibles. Their ancestors were French Royalists, and they had been swindled. Five hundred noblemen, artisans, and professionals had bought parcels in Ohio, sight unseen, from a sham company, and they sped west across the Atlantic in January 1790. Upon arrival they learned they owned nothing but paper. Most of them left within two years, but the twenty families that remained etched out a harsh and uncertain living until settlers from Massachusetts and Virginia joined them and set about building a stable community a stone’s throw from the river. They called it Gallipolis, “the city of Gauls.”

A century later, the town had a newspaper and electric streetcars, a hospital and a library. Trains rolled through daily and steamboats slogged by on the Ohio River and preachers set up big tents in parking lots to holler about temperance.

South of town, in a cabin on Sugar Creek, Emma Gatewood learned she was pregnant with her first child not long before her new husband struck her for the first time. He smacked her with an open hand, and the sharp sting of his palm on her cheek stunned
her, frightened her. She thought of leaving him that day and that night and on into the next, but where would she go? She had no paying job, no savings, and her education had ended in the eighth grade. She couldn’t return home and be a burden on her mother, who remained busy rearing children.

So she bit her tongue and stayed with P.C.

In October 1908, she delivered her first child, Helen Marie. P.C. wanted boys, and told her as much, so she gave birth again the following year, 1909, and again the child was female. They named her Ruth Estell. Their third child was born in June 1911—finally a boy—and they named him Ernest but took to calling him Monroe.

In the spring of 1913, P.C. bought an eighty-acre farm on Big Creek from his uncle, Bill Gatewood, for $1,000. Emma went to work hauling rocks and suckering tobacco, picking apples and pulling hay and coaxing the cows down off the hill—all while taking care of their growing family. She was a practical woman, a Roosevelt Republican, and knew how to do things for herself. She had a set of books from 1908 full of home remedies and concoctions that would take paint off the door or cure dandruff or kill ants. She had ripped out the page that explained how to ferment grapes to make wine.

When she wasn’t working or cooking for P.C. or cleaning the house or taking care of the kids, she’d park herself somewhere out of the way and get lost in a book. She read encyclopedias, but she was particularly fond of classic Greek poetry, quest stories like
The Odyssey
and
The Iliad,
and she read them cover to cover when she could find the time.

Their fourth child, William Anderson, was born in January 1914. The following year, the two eldest girls, Helen and Ruth, started school at Sardis, a one-room schoolhouse on the hill near Crown City, by State Route 553.

Then came Rowena, their fifth child, in 1916, and three months later Emma was pregnant again. A few weeks before she was due
to give birth, P.C. assaulted her. He didn’t drink or smoke, but he could lose his temper without aid, and he punched her in the face and head so many times that for two weeks she could barely rest it on a pillow. They named the baby Esther Ann.

In December 1918, they bought the Brown farm for $30,000, the place their children would come to think of as home. The farm included a field of fertile bottomland that ran flat as a tabletop from their hillside house to the Ohio River, about a quarter mile away. From the front porch, Emma could see the green hills of West Virginia across the river. The house had four bedrooms upstairs and one down, three covered porches and a basement. An old, defunct piano sat in the parlor, with a horsehair sofa that pulled out into a bed. A Victrola sat on a small table, near the bookshelf. The living room had a heating stove and the kitchen held a cooking stove and a sink with a hand pump that drew water from a cistern. One porch had a swing, and the children’s rooms had chamber pots they’d use in the winter. There was a plot large enough for a three-acre garden out front, and Emma woke early each day to tend to it by kerosene lamp. She grew rhubarb, cucumbers, beans, and a healthy patch of morning glories.