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Two thousand miles west, in Denver, Colorado, unbeknownst to most of the American public, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was nearly dead. The former four-pack-a-day smoker, on vacation in Denver, had played a round of golf the day before, then joined his wife and doctor for dinner, where he complained of stomach pains, which became worse as the evening turned to morning. The man whose legacy would be the Interstate Highway System had suffered a heart attack at the age of sixty-four, which would stick him on the eighth floor of Fitzsimmons Army Hospital for seven weeks and keep the nation on edge into the following year.
Back on the Appalachian Trail, the woman who had never had so much as a cold wasn't on her rock long before she saw dust plumes trailing two cars headed her direction.
The warden climbed out of one. Mary Snow from _Sports Illustrated_ and Mrs. Dean Chase from the United Press in nearby Millinocket came out of the other. Emma looked worn out. Her eye was still bruised, but she seemed to be in good spirits. After the greetings, they climbed in the cars and drove a mile or so to a canoe launch. The warden pulled a boat off the top of his vehicle and slid it into the freezing water as the women talked. Mrs. Chase snapped a few photographs as Emma, the warden, and Mary Snow piled into the vessel and started for the other side. The warden had affixed a small motor on the boat and they were across in no time. |
Mrs. Chase took the car around and was instructed to meet them at the campground near Katahdin. Emma and Mary Snow stepped ashore, thanked the warden, and began their hike together on a path alongside the Penobscot River. They talked as they walked. So much had happened since they had first met on Bear Mountain. Emma told her about the wind atop Mount Washington, about wading the hurricane-swollen creek with the navy boys, about having to push her sack through the holes in Mahoosuc Notch, about fashioning a discarded piece of rubber into an arch support. She told Snow about using a fork she found at a campsite to comb her hair. She told her about measuring distances between stepping stones in a swift-moving stream with her walking stick because of her broken glasses.
_I couldn't see so good,_ Emma said.
Snow asked her where she had been sleeping.
_Anywhere I could lay my bones,_ Emma said. Front porch swings. Picnic tables. Lean-tos. Logging camps.
_What about animals?_ Snow asked.
_Most people get scared when they come up against an animal,_ said Emma, _and right away think they have to make a fight out of it. Animals won't attack you unless you corner them. Fiddlesticks, I never even saw a bear. I made so much racket crashing and thumping through the woods._ |
By the time the two arrived at York's sporting camps, it had begun to rain. Snow asked to use the telephone and called the Katahdin Stream Campground where Mrs. Chase was waiting, and asked Chase to come pick her up at York's camps. They talked some more while they waited.
Snow wondered about Emma's general impressions of the trail. Did it meet her expectations?
_I read about this trail three years ago in a magazine and the article told about the beautiful trail, how well marked it was, that it was cleared out and that there were shelters at the end of a good day's hike,_ Emma said. _I thought it would be a nice lark. It wasn't. There were terrible blowdowns, burnt-over areas that were never re-marked, gravel and sand washouts, weeds and brush to your neck, and most of the shelters were blown down, burned down, or so filthy I chose to sleep out of doors. This is no trail. This is a nightmare. For some fool reason they always lead you right up over the biggest rock to the top of the biggest mountain they can find. I've seen every fire station between here and Georgia. Why, an Indian would die laughing his head off if he saw those trails. I would never have started this trip if I had known how tough it was, but I couldn't and wouldn't quit._ |
When Mrs. Chase arrived, Emma said good-bye and walked the rest of the way to the Katahdin Stream Campground in the rain. She registered for a cabin. The warden built a fire in the stove for her and brought her a lamp. Mary Snow and Mrs. Chase arrived by car as the evening cold began to set in. The warden brought some extra blankets and the women talked a little more before Snow gave Emma the balance of her lunch, and Snow and Chase climbed in the car and headed back to civilization in Millinocket.
Emma walked back to the warden's office and paid him for her cabin. On the walk back, she stopped at the different lean-tos, where fires lit the faces of campers, and chatted, telling her stories to the surprised and curious outdoorsmen. At the base of that mile-high mountain, on the 144th day of her journey, she felt important.
If the trail was a book, she was about to start the last chapter.
16
RETURN TO RAINBOW LAKE
SEPTEMBER 25, 2012
We woke in the dark at Katahdin Stream campground. I can't say woke, really, because it felt like I'd been awake all night, the kind of uncomfortable sleep that never fully sucks you in but instead keeps you right on the edge of consciousness. The pain was in my lower back, mostly, but it wouldn't be right to complain about spending a single night on the hard slats of a lean-to. |
"Most people today are pantywaist," Emma Gatewood told a reporter five decades ago. I wonder what she'd think of us now. I wonder what she'd think of the gear we're packing by the light of our headlamps, into ergonomically designed backpacks with what must be hundreds of pockets. Our Leatherman tools and cook-stoves and iPhones with compass apps.
Our goal was to retrace Emma's steps up Katahdin, using her diary and old trail maps as our guide. I wanted to see what she saw, walk where she walked, in a maddening effort to better understand her by covering the same ground she did fifty-seven years before, to the day, on September 25, 1955. "The end of the trail," she wrote in her journal.
This was sacred ground.
Five months earlier, I stood on Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia with the same purpose. Like much of the trail, the start has shifted. The southern terminus is now at Springer Mountain—about twenty miles northwest of the more impressive Oglethorpe—where it was moved in 1958 because of development and farming. To try to get some sense of what Emma saw, I had to ignore several NO TRESPASSING signs on the mountaintop and cross private property before beginning a hike downhill. I'd tracked Emma's footfalls through Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, though the trail has changed so much that it was challenging to know exactly where she had walked. I had climbed the bluffs overlooking Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where she stopped to enjoy the majestic view of the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah. I'd talked at length with her four surviving children—in Florida, Ohio, Arizona, and Arkansas—and her grandchildren, and I'd read her journals and many newspaper and magazine articles as well as a big box of correspondence her family has preserved. I had run my fingers over her old walking stick, a thin but sturdy branch from a wild fruit tree. I thought of climbing Katahdin, the highest point in Maine, as one last sacred pilgrimage, a search for the intangible. |
In her book _Wanderlust: A History of Walking,_ Rebecca Solnit writes:
A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape, and to follow a route is to accept an interpretation, or to stalk your predecessors on it as scholars and trackers and pilgrims do. To walk the same way is to reiterate something deep; to move through the same space the same way is a means of becoming the same person, thinking the same thoughts.
The Katahdin ascent is much the same today as it was in 1955, but more than half of the trail in Maine had been relocated. In 1968, after the passage of the National Trails System Act, the Maine Appalachian Trail Club reviewed the entire trail in the state and began to move the A.T. to a route that was more rewarding for the hiker and could be better maintained. Major relocation projects ran from the mid-1970s to the late '80s.
To be certain our climb was historically accurate, my wife and I hired Paul Sannicandro as a guide. Paul, a good-natured outdoorsman, is the trail supervisor at Baxter State Park, responsible for maintaining some 225 miles of footpath through a two-hundred-thousand-acre wilderness with forty-seven mountain peaks and sixty-seven lakes and ponds. The park was a gift to the people of Maine from former governor Percival Baxter, who bought and donated most of the land over three decades and established a fund, with his own millions, for its maintenance and operation. He wanted the park to remain wild, and despite logging and hunting and thousands of visitors a year, it has maintained for the most part the feeling and spirit of wilderness. |
We had met Paul two days before, over Maine lobsters at a dive in Millinocket. He reviewed our itinerary and he checked our packs to be sure we'd brought the appropriate clothing for the cold weather. I was already feeling like a pantywaist.
Using Emma's journal, Paul had calculated that she would have crossed the West Branch of the Penobscot near Abol Bridge, then walked along the northern bank of the Penobscot a few miles to the intersection of Nesowadnehunk Stream, then to Katahdin Stream Campground, where she spent the night before a hike up the Hunt Trail, past Thoreau Spring, to Baxter Peak. The next day, we followed her path, putting in about nine easy miles before we reached camp at the base of Katahdin, where we found a plaque implanted into a boulder:
MAN IS BORN TO DIE. HIS WORKS ARE SHORT LIVED. BUILDINGS CRUMBLE, MONUMENTS DECAY, WEALTH VANISHES. BUT KATAHDIN IN ALL ITS GLORY FOREVER SHALL REMAIN THE MOUNTAIN OF THE PEOPLE OF MAINE
P.P.B.
The next morning, we filled our canteens with cold water from the stream, finished stuffing our backpacks, and dropped our extra supplies at the ranger station. It was nearly freezing and still dark when we signed the register and left the campground at 5:50 AM, the same time Emma left, with guide Paul leading the way through the moonlit forest, flanked on both sides by aspens and maples, evergreens and ferns. Six hikers had left before us and many more would follow. I tried to imagine Emma traversing the rough terrain in the dark, her only light coming from a small flashlight. Enough day-hikers come through this stretch now that the path is eight feet wide in places, but in 1955 it wasn't much more than a game trail. |
It would have been impossible to accurately recreate in this spatial theater Emma's misfortune. Her bad knee. Her broken glasses and busted shoes. The fatigue she must have felt after climbing mountains for 144 straight days on sixty-seven-year-old legs. But I soon found a thin walking stick, our common denominator, and let those other thoughts percolate with each step. Katahdin was dry for our hike, but it had rained in the days preceding Emma's, so the flora was still wet then. Her shoes and dungarees were soaked quickly. "And I was not very warm," she wrote. Besides the dungarees and long-sleeved button-up she was wearing, she brought along every scrap of clothing she found in her bag. A T-shirt, a men's heavy wool pullover sweater, a satin-lined wool jacket, and a raincoat.
The trail runs through spruce thickets alongside Katahdin Stream, past a three-tiered waterfall that sounds like applause. It's barely visible in the gray light of morning as we pass, but I try to imagine Emma here, her ribs rising and falling with each heavy breath, trying to balance her sack on her shoulder while struggling over land where it appeared the sky had rained rocks. Alone. |
A century before she came through, before Earl Shaffer and Benton MacKaye, another pilgrim climbed this mountain. It was September 1846, and a group of men passed through Millinocket, then poled and paddled up the west branch of the Penobscot, camping at Abol Stream before moving up the flanks of Katahdin, or, as Henry David Thoreau called it, Ktaadn. Thoreau took the lead, bushwhacking through the backcountry, until he had a clear view of the mountain, which was different from any he'd ever seen due to the large proportion of naked rock rising above the forest. His companions set up camp, but Thoreau seized the remaining light and attempted to summit, climbing through "the most treacherous and porous country I ever traveled," stopping at the skirt of a cloud. He notes that before him, Ktaadn, an Indian word meaning highest land, was first ascended by white men in 1804, and only a handful had climbed it in the intervening forty-two years. "Besides these," he writes, "very few, even among backwoodsmen and hunters, have ever climbed it, and it will be a long time before the tide of fashionable travel sets that way." |
Thoreau turned back that day, but ascended again the following morning, leaving his companions far behind. He reached the tableland, a bare, rocky, gently sloping plateau, which he calls an "undone extremity of the globe." He seems to have felt out of place on the mountaintop, frightened to be there.
"This ground is not prepared for you," he writes.
Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys? I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. I cannot pity nor fondle thee here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where I _am_ kind. Why seek me where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother? Shouldst thou freeze or starve, or shudder thy life away, here is no shrine, nor altar, nor any access to my ear.
On his descent, he practically comes apart.
It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast, and drear, and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth.... There was there felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites,—to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we. |
I'm not sure if Emma ever read Thoreau's essay on Katahdin, but her own words hint often at the idea that she was measuring herself against nature, that the wild brought her context like a gift. On the trail, she said, "the petty entanglements of life are brushed aside like cobwebs." Thoreau writes that "some part of the beholder, even some vital part, seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends. He is more lone than you can imagine."
Emma told a reporter that she had found "an aloneness more complete than ever." I've thought a lot about that statement. Larry Luxenberg, who interviewed some two hundred A.T. hikers for his book _Walking the Appalachian Trail,_ says that if you applied the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator to the more than eleven thousand thru-hikers since Earl Shaffer, you'd find that the vast majority were introverts. Not so for Emma, who had no problem introducing herself to strangers or asking for a place to spend the night. She enjoyed company, to be sure, but found an equal reward in solitude. |
An hour or so into our hike we came to a bare spot in the trees. The sun was rising in the east, stretching bars of purple and pink across the horizon, beyond the treetops. After a slog up the mountain—and I mean to lend emphasis to the word _up;_ I ran a marathon in four hours in March, but I was breathing heavily and my legs trembled if I stood still for any length of time—we broke through the timberline and found ourselves facing a ridge of bare boulders known as Hunt Spur.
Our guide was well versed when it came to safety, and he had recounted for us several harrowing mountain rescues in which he had taken part. Anecdotally, injury visited hikers of all ages and skill levels. He told us about a man who tried to brace himself between two large boulders, and his own body weight had injured both shoulders. He had to be strapped to a stretcher and passed, rescuer by rescuer, down the mountain.
When we were exposed on that bare ground, the temperature seemed to plummet. The wind bit hard. Paul reminded us that we wanted to add and remove layers to avoid perspiring, a key to cold-weather survival. |
"When I got above the timberline, the wind nearly blew me off," Emma wrote. "I started putting on my extra clothes, a tee shirt, a man's heavy wool slip-on sweater, a satin lined wood jacket, and raincoat. By the time I was at the top with two pairs of wool socks, and gloves with raincoat sleeves over them, wool hood, silk scarf and plastic rainhood on my head, and I was just comfortable."
At several spots, metal bars have been buried into bald boulders. Hikers must climb using the rods, like climbing on top of monkey bars. Somewhere along the spur, my wife, Jennifer, winced in pain.
"You twisted your ankle?" I asked.
"Yeah," she said, favoring her right foot. "A little."
She promised she was OK, perhaps out of stubbornness, and hiked on. But it was noticeably causing her pain. Paul insisted we stop, so we did, behind a boulder that shielded us from the strong wind. Jennifer was hiking in five-toed Vibrams, but we'd brought along a pair of lace-up desert boots we bought at an Army-Navy surplus store. As Paul examined her ankle, it struck me that even a minor injury could be a major problem at this height. We'd been hiking nearly four hours, still an hour or so short of Baxter Peak. Getting back down on a broken ankle would be damn near impossible. I pictured a helicopter hovering above the ridge, trying to hold steady, lowering a basket to carry Jennifer to safety. I wondered what Emma would have done. We had cell phones, and we'd already seen a dozen or so day-hikers, but she found the mountain empty. |
Paul thought Jennifer should change into the boots for more ankle support, and she begrudgingly laced them up, breathing warmth onto her bare fingers so she could feel the laces. We had a drink of water and ate some nuts and energy bars before setting off again, carefully. The surroundings, from our vantage point, were enough to steal your breath. The sun was finally high enough to catch the dozens of lakes and ponds far below, painting them white, as if someone had dropped a giant mirror on Katahdin and the shattered shards lay splayed beneath us.
It was hard to identify any human activity at all in what must be the largest contiguous block of undeveloped, minimally maintained land in New England. I remembered something I'd read about Emma's climb in 1954, the first time she'd ever been on top of a mountain. She put on a black wool sweater at the top and ate a lunch of raisins while she counted the lakes and ponds below. She gave up when she got to one hundred.
We reached the Gateway, where the terrain levels off before rising again to the peak. Much of the tableland was covered with short, intricate, beautiful vegetation called diapensia. It's a minimalist plant that looks like an evergreen pincushion, no more than three or four inches tall. Its tiny leaves grow tightly together, insulating the plant's interior from cold. Intermingled with the diapensia is Bigelow's sedge, a rare flowering plant that grows on flatlands at high alpine elevations. Both plants are threatened and must be monitored carefully, Paul tells us. If alpine regions shrink because of global warming or human activity, there may be no suitable habitat left for Bigelow's sedge. And the Katahdin Arctic butterfly would disappear with it. |
The small butterfly is a subspecies of Polixenes Arctic and it is found nowhere else in the world besides the one thousand acres of tablelands on Mount Katahdin. Scientists have not accurately measured the population, but they do know it fluctuates dramatically. The females lay their eggs on sedges, and when the eggs hatch the larvae feed on the plants and slowly mature. In winter the larvae hibernate before starting to eat again in the spring. They mature to pupae in late summer and finally emerge the following year as adults, only to fly around for about a month, completing the two-year life cycle.
Park rangers here at Baxter were shocked when, in the mid 1990s, federal agents raided the homes of a pest exterminator and two businessmen in California and Arizona and found thirty-seven Katahdin Arctic butterflies among a collection of twenty-two hundred rare insects. Their audacious poaching operation—agents found letters from one man advising the others to, if caught, say, "Sorry, I didn't know you couldn't catch butterflies here"—sparked the first federal case against butterfly poaching and opened rangers' eyes to the threat of commercial butterfly collecting. What's interesting is that the Katahdin Arctic isn't big and beautiful like the monarch or the morpho. The prized and valuable butterfly is small, and dull brown in color. This target for poachers looks like a moth. |
A more predictable, manageable threat to Mount Katahdin habitats is walking. Hikers have destroyed diapensia and sedge through the years by trampling, until the park established a well-marked trail and signs to keep people off the plants. It's soon clear that not all hikers bother to read them, and traipse across the tableland off the path. Paul, pissed off, shouts a stern warning to an oblivious hiker who is marching through the delicate flora.
"Sorry, man," the hiker says.
Knowing the tenuous nature of plants and insects this high up makes me wonder if we should even be here. I left camp thinking we'd be trying to find Thoreau's sacred ground, Emma Gatewood's sacred ground, but I was beginning to feel like an interloper—even if we were sticking to the center of the trail.
Thoreau Spring, in the middle of the tablelands, looked like a mud puddle, swarmed by the dozens of boot prints from yesterday's hikers. As we would soon learn, there was a good chance that some of those footprints were left by men and women who had been inspired by Emma Gatewood's journey here. But what had inspired her? |
We took a short break by the mountaintop spring and I watched it slowly trickle downhill. A thought struck me: Climbing a mountain, climbing this mountain, means following a river against the flow through the valley, then a stream up on the mountain's flank, past waterfalls, and, eventually, to this little spring. It means walking against the hydrological cycle, against the order of things, to the source of life. To youth. To birth.
Back home, I had told a friend, a newspaper guy out in Wichita, Kansas, what I had been trying to do, how I'd been stalking Grandma Gatewood on the Appalachian Trail, trying to get inside her head. My friend shared a story.
In 1982, he and his wife put on their packs and began a multi-day hike up Pikes Peak in Colorado. After three or four days, when they'd finally reached the timberline, they were both exhausted. The flatlanders were in no shape to climb the 14,115-foot mountain. Every breath burned. Then my friend saw a bronze plaque affixed to a boulder, a memorial to a death on the mountain in 1957. |
DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF G. INESTINE B. ROBERTS AGE 88 YEARS WHO DIED AT TIMBERLINE AFTER HER FOURTEENTH ASCENT OF PIKES PEAK
Thirty years later, my friend still remembered the marker. He remembered being amazed that this octogenarian returned to the peak time and again, and met death on her final descent.
"What is it with old people and mountains?" he asked.
That's a fine question.
At Katahdin's summit, we found a surprise.
Several hikers had passed us on the climb, but we never expected to find a crowd. There were perhaps thirty-five hikers at the summit, and most of them were thru-hikers who had reached their final destination. Young and old and bearded and smelly. A group of them who had met and become friends on their long journey were cracking Budweisers and passing a joint. They had affixed a video recorder to the end of a walking stick and they were filming themselves, digital memories of the end of their nature hike. They spoke in a sort of trail code, which lent the scene a certain exclusivity, like a party you could get into only if you knew the secret knock. A young man with a big red bushy beard climbed atop the wooden KATAHDIN sign and balanced in a crow yoga pose as the rest of them laughed. There were at least two marriage proposals. Both couples had first met on the trail. |
In 2012, Appalachian Trail Conservancy records show, twenty-five hundred thru-hikers started in Georgia. Fewer than half— 1,012—logged in at Harpers Ferry, the psychological halfway point. One in five reported making it to Mount Katahdin. I sat on a rock and watched as even more pilgrims made their way to the sign. Their euphoria was contagious and almost moved me to tears. A gray-haired couple, slower and calmer than the rest, touched the sign and then embraced. They were both crying.
"You know it has to be this hard," the woman said. "It has to be."
Even though the A.T. has become better maintained and more crowded over the years, finishing a thru-hike remains a remarkable achievement. More than eleven thousand people have hiked all two-thousand-plus miles, many in sections. But among thru-hikers, on average, three out of four who start never finish, according to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. The number of two-thousand-milers, as they're called, has been on the rise in recent years, growing from 562 in 2005 to 704 in 2011. |
Those numbers would have seemed preposterous to the trail's planners and early organizers. In the 1930s, just five people reported hiking the entire trail, all of them in sections. (The trail was completed in 1937.) Only three finished in the 1940s—Earl Shaffer was the lone thru-hiker—a period during which the trail was again incomplete or unconnected in places. In the 1950s, when Emma came along, just fourteen reported two-thousand-mile hikes.
Then the numbers started to climb. The number of completions more than doubled in the 1960s: thirty-seven people logged in. Nearly eight hundred hiked all the way in the 1970s. The 1980s saw 1,420 completions. The 1990s: 3,301. The 2000s: 5,876.
Among the ranks of two-thousand-milers are two six-year-old boys, an eighty-one-year-old man, an eighty-year-old woman, a blind man, barefoot sisters, a cat, and a woman who, in 2011, reportedly completed the entire trail in forty-six days, eleven hours, and twenty minutes, the fastest-ever unofficial time. |
And as peaceful as it may seem, thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail can drip with controversy. It started with the legend himself: Earl Shaffer. The A.T.C. was skeptical of his claim until he showed hundreds of slides and gave a vast description of his trip. Over the years, Shaffer became the skeptic, writing of his suspicions that other early thru-hikers, including Grandma Gatewood, may have taken shortcuts.
In the mid-1990s, an elderly gentleman named Max Gordon told the _Appalachian Trailway News_ that he and five other teenage Boy Scouts from the Bronx had thru-hiked the trail in 1936, which, if true, would have made Earl Shaffer the seventh thru-hiker instead of the first. The man had solid recall of certain experiences along the trail, but other sections were blurry gaps in his memory. He could remember the names of just two of the other Scouts, and both were dead. He told the publication that he never knew the hike was important until he received a mailer from the A.T.C. in his old age and decided to bring it to someone's attention. |
Even without supporting evidence, the Appalachian Long Distance Hikers Association in 2000 adjusted its list of the first two-thousand-milers, and Earl Shaffer called for a reexamination. However, it was Shaffer's record that was again called into question, in 2011. A West Virginia lawyer and backpacker named Jim McNeely had been poring through Shaffer's old notebook, which had been turned over to the Smithsonian Institution upon Shaffer's death in 2002. The lawyer was trying to piece together the path of the old A.T., as it was in Shaffer's day, when he discovered that Shaffer had bypassed 170 miles of trail, taking shortcuts, accepting rides in cars, and walking on roads. McNeely, a former prosecutor, published an unbelievably detailed, nineteen-chapter, 164-page report that painted Shaffer as a fraud and hypocrite.
Presented with solid evidence that Shaffer had at least misrepresented his hike in revisions, the A.T.C. and the Appalachian Trail Museum took an interesting stance. Basically, _We're not in the detective business._ Shaffer's place in history stands as the first _reported_ thru-hike. |
The hiking community went nuts, dividing into two camps: the "purists" or "whiteblazers," who believe you must walk by every single white blaze—and if you miss one, you return to where you missed it; and the "hike your own hike" group, which tends to be less austere about rules on a spiritual walk from Georgia to Maine.
The two sides could argue for days about what constitutes a thru-hike, which is testament, ultimately, to their love for the trail, their love for this experience.
The joy at the top of Katahdin was palpable, for good reason. It felt wrong for me to intrude on their blissful and sacred moment, but I awkwardly approached the group and asked if they were familiar with Grandma Gatewood. They all nodded.
"Gotta have respect for someone who hiked the trail barefoot," a man said.
I didn't correct him. Her legend had evidently blossomed. I had heard some wild tales as well, growing up, from my mother. One has Emma scaring away a black bear with an umbrella.
Atop the mountain that day, I didn't talk to a single person who wasn't at least vaguely aware of Emma's accomplishments. What's more, many of them had been inspired by her, all these years later. |
"When it got hard, I'd think about her," one of the hikers said. "I'd think, 'She did it. I can, too.'"
Emma Gatewood reached the summit at Baxter Peak without ceremony before noon on September 25, 1955, twenty-six days before her sixty-eighth birthday, having hiked 2,050 miles through thirteen states, from Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia to the highest point on Mount Katahdin in Maine, the spot where the very first rays of morning sunshine touch the United States.
She planted her seventh pair of tennis shoes on the rocky top of the precipice, alone. Physically, even in her bulky red mackinaw, she was a shadow of the woman who had started walking 146 days before. She had lost thirty pounds. Her glasses were broken; her knee was sore. She wore the clothes of an immigrant to her altar in the sky and spoke aloud to an invisible audience.
_I did it,_ she said. _I said I'd do it and I've done it._
The sign planted in a rock cairn at the top said:
KATAHDIN NORTHERN TERMINUS OF THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL, A MOUNTAIN FOOTPATH EXTENDING 2050 MILES TO MT. OGLETHORPE, GEORGIA |
As the wind beat against her cheeks, Emma sang the first verse of "America the Beautiful," words that had come to a different woman in 1893, as she looked down from Pikes Peak.
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
A storm began moving onto the mountain and she didn't want to be trapped. She began to sign the register when a gust of wind caught her and nearly blew her down. She regained her balance. Then the sun peeked through the clouds for just a moment, like a wink, as though the heavens were acknowledging her presence.
17
ALONENESS MORE COMPLETE THAN EVER
SEPTEMBER 26-OCTOBER 9, 1955
She was a portrait of proper. Her iron-gray hair was clean and combed and pulled back. She wore a soft white blouse, red rayon suit, and medium-heeled black shoes.
"I decided to look a bit more presentable on the way back," Emma told Mrs. Dean Chase, the reporter with the United Press. "You know, it feels kind of good to get back into civilized clothes." |
She was the talk of the country. The headlines ran in newspapers everywhere.
MRS. GATEWOOD COMPLETES HIKE GRANDMA PLANS NEW YORK VISIT AS HIKE ENDS GRANNY TIRED
Earl Shaffer's hike had prompted a few newspaper stories and the article in the _National Geographic_ that inspired Emma. Gene Espy's hike a year later made local papers. The attention Emma received was unprecedented.
"A jovial little grandmother who lost 30 pounds in her trek along the Appalachian Trail said today that she has had 'all the walking I've wanted for a long time,'" read a story in the _Baltimore Sun._ "New Hampshire, she said, was the toughest part of the journey. Maine offered a few serious obstacles where there were 'blow-downs' of trees along the trail. Several times Mrs. Gatewood fell and strained an ankle or knee, slowing her. There has been frost every morning of the last week but Mrs. Gatewood said she found shelter and at least one good meal daily at sportsmen's camps. There is a little snow on the mountain." |
She was called "sprightly," "robust," "doughty," "determined," "straight-laced and old-fashioned," "strong," "frail-looking," and, surprisingly, "tall." According to the journalists, she reported feeling in "tip-top shape" and ready to walk "another thousand miles." She was in a good mood, she said, because this was the first morning that she "didn't get up at 6 o'clock and have to climb a mountain." She calculated that she had spent about two hundred dollars on the trail, roughly ten cents a mile.
She sent her glasses with Mary Snow to have them fixed and fitted with new lenses. The president of the Millinocket Chamber of Commerce gave her a tour of the nearby paper mill and treated her to lunch at the Great Northern Hotel. That afternoon, he drove her back to the chamber, where a group of businessmen and dignitaries had gathered. They presented Emma with a large picture of Mount Katahdin.
She posed for photographs in a potato field and fetched her repaired glasses from the ophthalmologist and ate a steak dinner with Mary Snow on the train to Bangor, courtesy of the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad, where she scratched out a postcard, addressed it to a Roman Catholic parish in Harlem and dropped it in the mail, still unaware that she'd stayed the night with the leaders of two rival street gangs. |
"I made it!" she wrote. "Remember me to all those young men I owe my life to. Please tell them they are welcome to come visit me anytime, as also are you. Love, Emma."
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.
18
AGAIN
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. |
In May 1957, a journalist named Murray T. Pringle wrote a story for _American Mercury_ called "Tried Walking Lately," which pointed out that Americans had become irreversibly dependent on the automobile. "No American generation has walked less than the present one, or has paid less heed to Thomas Jefferson's dictum that 'Of all exercises, walking is the best.'"
The card arrived at Lucy's house in Columbus, Ohio, postmarked CARATUNK, MAINE.
Sept. 7, 57
Dear Lucy, Louise, et al,
There was a reception of about twenty met me at the river yesterday evening. Two reporters, four forest wardens and others. I think I will be through in ten days. I have taken so much time off to visit or could have been done. I am fine and having the time of my young life. Hoping all is fine with you. I am, with love, Mamma.
MOUNT KATAHDIN, ME, SEPT. 16 - (AP) - Mrs. Emma Gatewood, a 69-year-old grandmother from Gallipolis, Ohio will climb Mt. Katahdin's 5267-foot peak today after completing her 2026-mile hike along the Appalachian Trail. |
It was the second trip along the trail for Mrs. Gatewood. She is the first woman to have completed the journey in its entirety in one season. She started the trip from Mt. Oglethorpe, Ga., April 27, and arrived here yesterday.
They called her "Queen of the Forest."
In 1955, she was the first woman to thru-hike alone. In 1957, she became the first person—man or woman—to walk the world's longest trail twice. She reached the Katahdin summit nearly blind because her glasses kept fogging over during the climb, so she simply took them off. "I could not see," she wrote in her diary. "It made me plenty nervous getting down over all those rocks, but I slowly made it without accident."
She descended the mountain with a spate of new stories. "Gettin' too old," she told a reporter at the bottom of the mountain. "There were places where I had to pull myself over sheer rocks and I'm afraid I'll get to the age where I won't be able to do that anymore."
She had walked within six feet of a rattlesnake in May, in the Georgia foothills. She backed away, waited ten minutes for the snake to move, then cut around through the woods, leaving the "sassy thing" rattling. |
About her lack of nourishment a few days later, she wrote, "I was so tired and my knees felt weak from lack of food, I wobbled when I walked." At her weakest, she approached an unpainted shack to ask for food. Dogs ran out barking and a man with a peg leg appeared on the porch. The place looked so poor that she did not expect to find a meal, but the peg-legged man had heard about Emma's hiking and sent her away with boiled eggs, corn pone, stewed beef, an onion, and a can of condensed milk.
An old mutt followed her from Tennessee to Virginia and into a store, where she bought new shoes and left her old high tops—and the dog.
On June 14, she saw her first bear, coming down the trail. She shouted, "Hey!" and the bear loped off.
She was bitten by something—she didn't know what—near Roanoke and her leg swelled to the knee. It grew so bad that she begged a ride to the doctor. She didn't tell him who she was or what she was doing for fear he'd try to stop her. He gave her penicillin, the first she'd ever had, and also some pink pills he did not identify. She spent the rest of the day on the couch of a stranger who waited on her as though she were an invalid. Her foot ached for days and made walking painful. |
On June 27, she walked through Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. "No one recognized me," she wrote in her journal. "Still think I am a tramp."
She spent a solid July day in Pennsylvania not talking to Dorothy Laker, who would become the second woman to thru-hike by herself. "I started before five, but it was not long until [Laker] passed me. I did not talk to her. Then I passed her, on and off, all day, but never saying a word to each other." Laker, in her own account of the day, doesn't mention Emma at all. It's hard to know why the two didn't speak. Competition, maybe?
In August, Emma walked up on a shelter occupied by Boy Scouts and saw their leader sitting outside in his "birthday clothes."
On the best nights, she was greeted warmly by friends she had made two years before and slept on comfortable mattresses in climate-controlled houses. On unlucky nights, she found shelter beside ant-infested logs, or on piles of leaves or grass, or, on one rainy evening, inside a large pasteboard box that surprisingly kept her fairly dry. She slept under the trailer of a long-haul eighteen-wheeler, and in the posh Bear Mountain Inn, and at the Laurel Ridge Tourist Home, where, she wrote, "There was so much noise all night by giggling girls and indecent sounds I did not sleep much. I would liked to have thrown a lot of things down stairs." |
She even made her bed one night in the amen corner of an abandoned country church.
In New York, she witnessed an AWOL soldier turn himself in to the state police. In Connecticut, she rode in a parade onboard a fire engine with the volunteer fire department. In several towns where word of her travels arrived early, folks hosted welcoming parties that made Emma feel special. One woman, upon recognizing her, gave Emma a kiss that could be heard around the block.
On the path, the beauty of nature fulfilled her. She gazed at a mountainside violet with a purple tip, like an orchid. She watched a wood-pewee feed her babies in a nest in the corner of a lean-to. A wild turkey crossed her path. She was resting one afternoon on a thick, moss-covered log, daydreaming, when a red fox came jogging down the path, carrying small prey in its mouth, oblivious to the old woman lying on the log. She watched it come near, then asked, "Are you bringing me my dinner?" The fox shot through the forest like a red streak. |
She hadn't kept this hike a secret like she had the last. She sent postcards home from Clingmans Dome, in Tennessee.
"She was sending cards to all of us, at different times and from different places," Nelson told me. "She was hiking fourteen miles a day, so we intercepted her. We went up east of Harrisburg, to Lehigh Gap, Pennsylvania, and here she came. We took her to dinner there, and the next morning we hiked up the rock formation called Devil's Pulpit. She was having a good time. She just talked about the trail, told us about things she had run across. Told us about the bear."
She met reporters, too, nearly everywhere she went. Even more so than the first trip, this journey was well-documented in American newspapers, magazines, and on television.
"Some people think it's crazy," she told one reporter. "But I find a restfulness—something that satisfies my type of nature. The woods make me feel more contented."
"What made you do all this?" a reporter asked.
"The forest is a quiet place and nature is beautiful. I don't want to sit and rock. I want to do something." |
She told them she found the trail in better condition that year. Her initial criticism had prompted hiking clubs to clean and mark parts of the trail. That was also part of the reason she finished the hike in fewer days.
Before she left Millinocket, the chamber of commerce presented her with a blue and gray suit. She spoke to the students and teachers at the local high school. She spent part of one day baking special cookies, then delivered them to patients at the Millinocket Community Hospital.
Back home in Gallia County, she was the talk of the town. The Blue Devil marching band played theme music to honor her at a Friday night football game. The chamber of commerce presented her a plaque at halftime and declared it "Grandma Gatewood Night."
"I'd like to go to the South Pole," she told a group of Gallipolis Rotarians who invited her to speak, "but nobody'll take me there. There's no need for old ladies at the South Pole. I guess they have their own cooks."
The Queen of the Forest posed with politicians and told her story at school assemblies. She addressed the Palmerton Over 60 Club and the League of Ohio Sportsmen and welcomed even more reporters to sit and chat. |
"Mrs. Gatewood possesses a wonderful sense of humor," one wrote. "She reports having had a good laugh all by herself near the beginning of her hike. She had lain down to rest under a tree and after a bit, quite unconsciously moved her arm and frightened away a buzzard that was about to light. She thought to herself, 'I'm not ready to have my bones picked yet.'"
With the second A.T. hike complete, she began striking out elsewhere. She spent eight days and nights on the Baker Trail in Pennsylvania, and when she stopped in Aspinwall on the Allegheny River, she spent three weeks at the Redwing Girl Scout camp, chopping trees, setting up tents, and preparing the camp for winter. She was invited to a weeklong retreat at Canter's Cave 4-H camp in Ohio, forty-three miles from her home. She walked there.
In 1958, at age seventy, she climbed six mountains in the Adirondack Range and expressed interest in joining the Forty-Sixers, a club of men who had climbed all forty-six Adirondack peaks of more than four thousand feet. Occasionally she'd ask a young relative or friend to accompany her, but she was careful not to bend societal norms. When an older man asked to join her on an extended hike, she declined. _People would talk,_ she said. She had become an evangelist for walking, for experiencing nature, at a time when pedestrianism in America was in steep decline. She wrote of its benefits often in flowery poems. |
"The Reward of Nature"
If you'll go with me to the mountains
And sleep on the leaf carpeted floors
And enjoy the bigness of nature
And the beauty of all out-of-doors,
You'll find your troubles all fading
And feel the Creator was not man
That made lovely mountains and forests
Which only a Supreme Power can.
When we trust in the Power above
And with the realm of nature hold fast,
We will have a jewel of great price
To brighten our lives till the last.
For the love of nature is healing,
If we will only give it a try
And our reward will be forthcoming,
If we go deeper than what meets the eye.
She didn't reveal her plans for the next big hike, but soon enough everyone would know.
_Sitting beside Sunfish Lake, New Jersey, near the Delaware Water Gap, age sixty-nine, 1958._ Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds
19
PIONEER WOMAN
1959
The streets of Portland were packed. Traffic was backed up in all directions. There was a maelstrom of cars, horses, dogs, bicycles, and people, some five thousand of them, many with white hair, waiting in the August heat on the little old woman to walk down Sandy Boulevard, through the gold ribbon stretched across the intersection of Eighty-Second Avenue. |
A cheer went up when Emma Gatewood came into view. She was flanked by several hundred elderly citizens, some of them clad in pioneer-era clothing, who had hiked the last few miles with her.
The seventy-one-year-old woman looked tired. Spent. Her skin was leathery and tanned to a deep bronze. The soles of her shoes were worn thin. She seemed ready to collapse.
The press had been speculating for days that she wouldn't make it to her goal. A rumor spread that she had accepted a ride, and this became a sign that she might abandon her walk short of her destination.
GRANDMA'S TRAIL-WEARY, proclaimed the _Miami News._
RIDE, REST HINT WALK MIGHT END, read the headline in the _Spokane Daily Chronicle._
WALKING GRANDMA MAY GIVE UP GOAL, shouted the _Toledo Blade._
Indeed, it had been a grueling trip. This wasn't the Appalachian Trail, with its shade trees and beautiful vistas and cold-water springs. Those were scarce between Independence, Missouri, and Portland, Oregon. In ninety-five days she had walked at three miles per hour on scalding asphalt through Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon carrying a blue umbrella she bought for $1.50 to protect her from the sun. It had survived the entire trip in spite of the passing trucks that tried to rip it from her hands, and it came to be a symbol for guts and determination. |
She did her best to stick to the Old Oregon Trail, which was blazed by trappers and traders and pioneers in the early 1800s and served as the main route for a half million settlers seeking a better life in the West. In Vale, Oregon, she even took time to visit the grave of John D. Henderson, an immigrant who died of thirst, or maybe the black measles, in 1852, in the desert between the Malheur River and Snake River. The story has it that his team died not long into the trip from Independence. Henderson decided to continue on foot, but he couldn't make it. A blacksmith chiseled his name into stone and pressed on.
The idea to walk the trail had come to her while reading about the Oregon Centennial Exposition. She had spent a chunk of 1958 hiking other pieces of the Appalachian Trail, intending to string together a third two-thousand-mile hike in sections. She had walked from Duncannon, Pennsylvania, to North Adams, Massachusetts. A hike west was indeed a change of scenery.
"I read a piece in the newspapers about that wagon train going to Oregon [in conjunction with the exposition], and I thought of all the women who walked behind the wagons when they went to settle the country," she told a reporter in Junction City, Kansas. "I was looking for something to do this summer and a walk to Oregon seemed like the best thing." |
She left Independence, Missouri, on May 4, two weeks after former president Harry Truman waved good-bye to the seven-wagon train, and plodded through the plains. She sent a postcard home from Denver, Colorado, on June 3, saying that the snow on the mountains was beautiful and that the governor of Oregon had made her a goodwill ambassador at large and that she was staying with some folks who stopped her on the road. "I am fine," she wrote. She passed the wagon train a month later, in Pocatello, Idaho, but the journey had been difficult. She slept outdoors in the Wyoming sagebrush on fourteen nights.
The newspapers called her "America's most celebrated pedestrian" and printed updates along the way, and again people across the country started pulling for the grandma who wouldn't stop walking.
"My legs go mechanical-like," she told one reporter. "When someone stops me, I have to make an effort to get them going again."
Emma mailed a letter to Lucy in Columbus on July 27, when she arrived in Meacham, Oregon. "Things are getting quite exciting for me," she wrote. |
I went to a rodeo... where there was ten thousand fans and was introduced over the loudspeaker and stood up and waved with the floodlights on me. When I came to a two-lane bridge several hundred feet long across the Snake River, the Highway Patrol held up the traffic one way while I walked across. I felt like Royalty. The Patrol are keeping close watch to see that I do not come to harm. A man from the Centennial Staff met me on the highway and gave me a pass and said I would have a car with chauffeur to use, get all the clothes I needed, have a hotel with all expenses paid, and one day of the Centennial would be proclaimed Emma or Grandma Gatewood day. From what I hear from there, there will be other favors. I am a little excited but not losing any sleep over it. I wish you could be here to enjoy it with me. I have 250 miles to go yet. Folks are doing everything for me. They came to help me have a pleasant trip. Things are very pretty here. After all the treeless country, they surely look good. I will get to Pendleton tomorrow and will soon be going down the Columbia River, which I am told is very beautiful. I was given a dress, shoes, and suitcase at Baker and they have been sent by the Chamber of Commerce on to Portland. I will be getting mail in Portland addressed General Delivery if you want to write. Hoping all is fine there. I am, with love, Mamma. |
Large groups in Oregon anticipating her arrival began to gather roadside and cheer her through. Even the trainman on a passing caboose waved and asked her if she wanted a ride.
Her patience was tested when she began to be badgered by people who wanted to take her picture and ask her the same set of questions. The attention had begun to grate, and by the end her emotions were ragged. She told one reporter that she felt like a "sideshow freak." She began to approach crowds with her head bowed and a handkerchief covering part of her face.
West of Meacham, near La Grande, a bevy of motorists stopped her beside the road, but as they snapped pictures and rattled off a flurry of questions, she simply walked away. Farther west, outside The Dalles, she threw stones at a pesky newsman. Near Hood River, a few days before she got to Portland, a young photographer approached her and squatted to take her picture. She swung her umbrella and struck him on the forehead, leaving a big red welt and drawing blood. In the articles that ran the next day, Emma was called "peppery" and the photographer was quoted saying she "hit like a mule." |
"She let me have it," the photographer, Robert Hall, told reporters. "But when she saw the blood on my face, she cried and said she felt awful. I told her all was forgotten."
Someone brought her a lawn chair, a hamburger, and a glass of ice water, and she calmed down. She even hugged Robert Hall. All was forgiven.
Now, on August 7, nearly two thousand miles from where she started, she walked the last short stretch into Portland at a clip that had the Centennial greeters, news reporters, and other well-wishers gasping for breath. The city was buzzing. Portland politicians had declared it Grandma Gatewood Day and boosters had greeted her with flowers at the city line. Police had blocked off a lane of traffic to allow Emma, and the hundreds now walking with her, safe passage. The traffic jam, according to a reporter for the _Oregonian,_ was unprecedented.
When Emma reached the ribbon, she was overcome with tears. She brushed it apart and fell into the arms of a stranger and wept. She seemed shaken by it all, particularly the crowds. She climbed into a police car with Capt. John Pittenger to get away from the crush for a few minutes. When she had regained her composure, she returned to the intersection and got into the back of a red Oldsmobile convertible and, beaming, rode off in a motorcade toward the exposition grounds. |
"Who do they think I am?" she asked the mayor of Portland. "Queen Elizabeth?"
She showered and traded in her faded and torn cotton blouse and skirt for a donated dress, an Evelyn Gibson French blue crepe with a pale pink Alençon lace yoke and matching jacket. She donned a blue hat and white gloves and carried a new purse. The outfit was provided for free, as was a lunch of salad, crab cocktail, and well-done roast beef, which she ate with the mayor and police chief. Emma took one shoe off while they ate, but nobody seemed to mind. Her old clothes and the umbrella were taken for an exhibit at the museum of history.
Presents poured in from all corners. She was given the key to Portland. Someone donated a new umbrella. Someone else a watch. She accepted a corsage and gold plaque from the East Broadway Boosters. She got a big basket of fruit from the Hollywood Boosters, then took a ride over the city in a bright yellow helicopter. As she climbed off the helicopter, a woman approached to take her picture and Emma knocked the camera to the ground and immediately felt bad. She apologized dramatically, saying she was still vexed by the great hordes of people who wanted her picture. |
The city of Portland put her up at the luxurious Hotel Benson, where she was pampered. Overwhelmed as she was, she seemed pleased by all the attention. She was invited to Hollywood and hammed it up on Art Linkletter's _House Party._ She was alternatively the guest of the Oregon Centennial Commission, the Oregon Coast Association, and others who showed her around the state. They drove her to the coast where a group of colorfully dressed Coos Bay Pirates surprised her and presented her with a scarf. She was whisked to Medford, waded in the Pacific at Seaside, piloted a fifty-two-foot Coast Guard rescue boat near Newport, fished for salmon at Gold Beach, and rode the mail boat to Agness. Nearly everywhere she went she got a key to the city. A month later, when it was time to leave, the bus company gave her an open ticket, fixed so she could stop anywhere along the line through Seattle, Spokane, Glacier National Park, Winnipeg, Chicago, Detroit, Columbus, and Gallipolis.
She was everyone's grandma now. |
At the end of the year, when the United Press in Oregon put together its list of the biggest news of 1959, it included stories about the Portland newspaper strike, the collision of two jets over Mount Hood, the successful separation of Siamese twins, the discovery of two bodies in the Columbia River, and the kidnapping of the Harrisburg police chief. At number two on the list, just below a story about the combustion of a truck laden with six tons of explosives in downtown Roseburg that killed thirteen citizens and caused ten million dollars in damage, was the Oregon Centennial and the following line: "An Ohio grandmother, Mrs. Emma Gatewood, hiked on foot all the way to Portland."
In November 1959, two months after she'd headed for home, Emma was invited back to the NBC Studios in Hollywood to be a special guest on Groucho Marx's television quiz show _You Bet Your Life_ alongside author Max Shulman, who wrote the Dobie Gillis stories and had just released a Dobie Gillis novel called _I Was a Teen-Age Dwarf._ In an episode that aired the following January, Emma appeared from behind a wall and walked sheepishly across the stage as the audience politely clapped. She wore a pearl choker, dark medium-heeled shoes, a plain dress, and a short jacket. Her thick glasses magnified her eyes. She reached out and shook Marx's hand. |
"Emma, I'm delighted to meet you," he said. "And Max, of course I've known you for some time. Now, where are you from, Emma?"
"Gallipolis, Ohio," she says.
"Gallipolis, Ohio?"
"Yes."
"Isn't there a famous writer who came from there?"
"McIntyre," she said.
"O. O. McIntyre, yeah," Groucho said. "See what a memory I have for trivia?"
"Mm-hmm."
"He was a very good columnist in his day. He always talked about Gallipolis, but I notice he lived in New York," Groucho said as the audience giggled. "He was always talking about Gallipolis. Were you born on a farm, Emma?"
"Yes, I was."
"Why was this?" he said. "I mean, what did your folks raise on the farm in addition to you?"
"Tobacco, corn, wheat, and a little Cain," she said, smiling slyly.
"A little Cain?" Groucho said.
Emma giggled.
"How big a family did he raise, Emma?"
"Fifteen."
"Fifteen? Well he must've raised quite some Cain."
She laughed with her lips sealed, like she was trying to hide her teeth.
"You think fifteen children in one family is a good idea?" Groucho said. "Would you recommend it—" |
"No."
"—to other parents?"
"No," she said. "That's too many. They can't take proper care of 'em."
"Do you have children?"
"I have eleven," Emma said.
"In other words, you don't subscribe to your own philosophy, do you?" Groucho asked, looking sideways at the audience.
Groucho turned to Shulman.
"There's one thing in your book that I find extremely interesting, Max. You say that our society has developed a matriarchy. Would you explain this in detail for Emma here?"
"Oh, certainly," Shulman said. "I'd be happy to. This is a country run by women, without question."
"You'll get no argument out of me," Groucho said.
"When you and I were boys, when Dad came home at night, no matter how hard he'd been working during the day, he could depend on it that Mama was more tired than he, because she had been baking bread and scrubbing clothes by hand and making soap and cooking dinner. But today, with automatic washers and driers and store bread and TV dinners and power steering, he comes home at night, he's just dragging himself into the house and she looks as though she's spent a month in the country. She's full of plans. She says, 'Dear, don't you think we ought to flood the study and make an aquarium out of it?' Or, 'Don't you think we ought to put another set of braces on Peter's teeth?' You know, things like that. Now this poor tired man lying there says, 'You decide, honey.' Well, you give a woman power like that and she's bound to achieve the size to go with it." |
"There's no doubt about this," Groucho said. "The women are in the driver's seat."
"But I must say, I don't think women like it that way," said Shulman.
"I don't think so either. I think they're very insecure," Groucho said.
"They would prefer the men to run the home and the country," Shulman said.
"But the men have relinquished."
"That's right."
"They have capitulated."
"The women have gotten it by default."
"That's right."
"So nobody's happy," Shulman said. "The men don't want it. The women don't want it. And the kids don't know who their fathers are."
At this the audience laughed.
"Now, Emma, what about you?" Groucho said. "You've been listening to this sophomoric conversation here. Do you think it's a good idea for the wife to run the family?"
Emma closed her eyes and paused for a second or two.
"Nope."
"Well, Emma, now that your children are grown, what do you do for excitement?"
"Oh, I hike," she said.
"You _hike?"_
"Yes."
"You mean you just keep walking. What kind of walking do you do?"
"I walked the Oregon Trail." |
"The _Oregon Trail?_ You walked it?" he said.
"Yes, I walked it."
"You mean like Lewis and Clark?"
"Yes."
"When was this?"
"This year."
"You walked the Oregon Trail this year," Groucho said. "How did you arrive at that kind of a pastime?"
"Oh, I didn't have anything else to do," she said. "The family is all married and gone and I just wanted to do something."
"How old are you?"
"Seventy-two."
"Seventy-two? And how long was this trip that you..."
"Two thousand miles."
Gasps spread across the room. One person in the audience began clapping. More joined in and the applause rose. Emma's expression was blank. She looked at the ground and swayed just a little.
"What were you walking for?" Groucho asked.
"Well, I like to walk..."
"When you got to the other end, what happened? Did you turn around and walk back again?"
"No. This year I walked up to the Centennial, up to Portland."
"From where?"
"Independence, Missouri."
"Oh, my," said a woman in the audience. A man whistled and another began to clap. A low chatter commenced and you could picture the audience turning to each other mid-gasp, awed by this woman who now had a small smile on her lips. |
Back home in Gallia County, Emma collected a few paw-paw seeds and buckeyes and put them in a pouch with a card addressed for Portland Mayor Terry Schrunk. She wrote that she enjoyed her visit. Alas, like many settlers before, she wrote, "My family are all here and I supposed I will remain here."
Well. Sort of. Home was more like home base.
20
BLAZING
1960–1968
"She's sitting right over there." The bus terminal manager pointed across the room, toward the thick Thursday afternoon crowd. "The lady in the blue coat."
The reporter walked through the bus station, toward the seventy-two-year-old woman wearing white gloves, a white blouse, thick glasses, and a winter hat to keep her ears warm against the February cold. She seemed impatient. She'd been sitting a while. The reporter introduced himself.
"If that bus doesn't come soon," she said, "I'm going to walk to Dayton."
Emma was in Chillicothe, Ohio, trying to catch a ride. She had to be in Cincinnati by Saturday and wanted to visit her son, Nelson, before then. |
The reporter asked the standard questions, the ones she'd answered a thousand times. _Why do you hike? Why do you hike alone? How do you survive in the wild?_ She told him she'd been named a lifetime member of the National Campers and Hikers Association and that she was working on establishing hiking trails through the Ohio hills. A few months before, the executive committee of a nonprofit called Buckeye Trail, Inc., of which she was a charter member, had received permission from the state to begin marking a trail from Lake Erie south through the Zaleski State Forest and on to Cincinnati. The blazing was expected to take four or five years. "The nation's most famous trail walker," the _Columbus Dispatch_ had called her in a story about the effort.
The reporter asked how she kept in good enough shape to blaze trails.
"Exercise is most important," she said. "Too many people hop in the car to go two blocks for a bar of soap."
_Where was she headed now?_ he asked.
"I've always wanted to ride on a boat," she said. |
A letter came to Lucy on February 24, 1960. Emma was aboard the _Delta Queen,_ a Mississippi River steamboat, heading from Cincinnati to New Orleans for Mardi Gras with 130 passengers from fifteen states and Canada. The night before, docked in Memphis, the _Delta Queen_ calliope premiered. Five thousand people and the mayor of Memphis stood on the banks to listen. "It has been a nice trip so far," she wrote. "We have a masquerade party tonight."
Two months later, on April 28, she set out from Springer Mountain in Georgia, the new southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, to try to complete her third A.T. hike. She had to abandon the hike after seventy-five miles, at Deep Gap, North Carolina, because of a massive blowdown. "It would take 100 men three months to cut their way through that," she told the local paper.
On June 2, she was photographed hiking along the eighty-five-mile Horseshoe Trail near Hershey, Pennsylvania, where she had asked a group of boys if they had any food.
Thirteen days later, on June 15, a reporter found her ninety-five miles away, in Wind Gap, Pennsylvania. She told him she was headed "vaguely north," maybe to Canada. |
"You look strong," the reporter told her.
"What did you expect?" Emma replied.
He asked if she kept her children in the loop with postcards.
"I write to 'em," she said, "but I don't tell 'em nothing. I don't see any use in making a big fuss about it. I just do what I want to do."
A week later, she was at her daughter Lucy's door, in White Plains, New York, telling of the porcupine that tried to sleep on her feet and the rat she kicked away while she slept against a stone wall.
Two weeks later, a resident of Cheshire, Massachusetts, phoned the local newspaper to report that the "tough as a nail" hiking grandmother had just left her home for the summit of nearby Mount Greylock, the highest point in the state, the peak coveted by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry David Thoreau.
A few days later, the _North Adams Transcript_ reported that "the great-grandmother of the hiking fraternity" paid for a fifteen-minute airplane ride so she could see the Appalachian Trail from above.
Twenty-three days later, on August 7—one year to the day from when she finished the Oregon Trail—Emma crossed the border into Canada, the Long Trail of Vermont behind her. There were no cheering crowds. Just trees. She was happy nonetheless. She scratched out a letter and sent it to the folks back home. |
It was a hard trip, but in spite of all the obstacles I stuck it out to the end. Some of those mountains are quite a challenge for one my age, and I wondered a lot of times whether I could make it, but I kept putting one foot ahead of the other until I got to Canada. I did not sleep out as there are plenty of cabins and shelters. Only three times was there anyone in camp with me. There were two boys who started from the north but will not go far I imagine, as they were too lazy to get up and start in the morning. One has to work hard at it if they are to get far. I hiked alone the entire trip, but I took my time so that I did not hurt myself in any way. I saw a bear and a cub on Breadloaf Mountain. The cub went up a tree and the mother pranced around going "whup, whup." I was about 30 feet from them and they were too near the trail for me to pass. I went back and sat on a rock for a few minutes and they went away. I roasted a porcupine that I killed. I first threw him in the fire and got all the quills off, then I skinned the thing. It looked all right and did not smell bad. It had such a nice liver so I put it on a stick and roasted it, salted it and cut off a bite, took one or two chews on it and spit it out. It took me two or three days to get that taste out of my mouth. I had the porky over the fire, and after the liver my imagination got the better of me and I dropped the thing in the fire and burned him up. |
Altogether I have hiked about 700 miles this year and wore out two pairs of tennis shoes. I cannot see that the trip hurt me any. I am now seventy-two years old and able to do a lot more hiking.
In 1960, as Emma Gatewood covered the country by boat and plane and mostly on her own two feet, something strange was happening. That April, two British paratroopers—Sgt. Patrick Maloney, thirty-four, and Sgt. Mervyn Evans, thirty-three—left San Francisco on a walk to New York. They aimed to make the trip in seventy days in an attempt to break the cross-country record of seventy-nine days, which had stood since 1926.
This was not long after J. M. Flagler, writing for the _New Yorker,_ bemoaned the loss of long-walker Edward Weston and American pedestrians of his day. "Nowadays," he wrote, "distance, endurance, and speed walking are all but lost arts in America."
The pedestrian headlines were back, and the paratroopers weren't the only ones making them. Walking behind the two soldiers was Dr. Barbara Moore, a British vegetarian who embarked on the 3,250-mile walk to show that her diet of fruits, vegetables, and grass juice were better for endurance than an American diet of meat and coffee. The doctor claimed that she had cured herself of leukemia with an experimental diet. She said she planned to have a baby at age 100, and live to be 150. |
Somewhere along the route, the vegetarian, who was accompanied most of the way by a supply-laden car, vowed to beat the paratroopers to New York. She passed them at least once out West, as they slept, but the men, who swore they weren't racing, soon pulled ahead. They gained a larger lead when Moore was struck by a car and hospitalized in Brazil, Indiana.
By the time the paratroopers made it to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the vegetarian was lobbing accusations that they had cheated by hitching rides. She told reporters she had affidavits stating they had caught rides for nearly a third of the way. The two men finished in sixty-six days, shattering the record. Moore limped into Times Square and into throngs of onlookers after a rough eighty-five days of walking, complaining that the paratroopers had taken an easier route.
Emma knew about the paratroopers and told a reporter that she'd like to meet them. What about Moore? "Some people think I ought to make it a point to see her," Emma said, "but I don't think we'd agree on anything." |
Something new was afoot, though. _Newsweek_ sniffed it out the same year. A fad was sweeping the United Kingdom: distance walking. It wasn't just the vegetarian and the paratroopers. One man had walked 110 miles from Norwich to London in thirty hours. After that, 250 women representing armed forces auxiliaries walked from Birmingham to London. A chronometer factory owner in Saint Albans who thought kids were sissies challenged his four hundred male employees to walk fifty miles in fifteen hours. Thirty-two tried, and sixteen finished.
The United States was a little slow to catch on, but by 1963, distance walking was taking the country by storm. "The Marines are marching. Girls are marching. Practically everyone is marching," wrote the Associated Press in February. The hoopla began when Marine Commandant Gen. David M. Shoup unearthed a long-forgotten executive order from President Theodore Roosevelt that prescribed fitness standards for marines. In 1908, Roosevelt felt the marines should be in good enough shape to walk fifty miles in three days, with a total of twenty hours' rest. Shoup sent the document to President John F. Kennedy as a historic courtesy. Kennedy wondered whether modern marines could pass the test, and in a matter of hours, marine headquarters issued a directive ordering a test by officers of the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Kennedy casually noted in a letter to Shoup that Roosevelt "laid down such requirements not only for the officers of the Marine Corps but, when possible, for members of his own family, members of his staff and cabinet, and even for unlucky foreign diplomats who were dragooned into hiking with him through Washington's Rock Creek Park." Furthermore, he wrote, if the test indicates "that the strength and stamina of the modern Marine is at least equivalent to that of his antecedents, I will then ask Mr. Salinger to look into the matter personally and give me a report on the fitness of the White House staff." |
As soon as word of the challenge got out, people across the country, strangely, started walking, aiming at fifty miles. Boy Scouts hiked in Illinois. Secretaries sauntered in Washington, DC. Students at Stanford University set out. Politicians looking for headlines took off with reporters trailing them. Four hundred high school kids in Marion County, California, tried for fifty miles and ninety-seven of them finished, including nineteen girls. Attorney General Robert Kennedy finished fifty miles in seventeen hours and fifty minutes.
"Heel blisters became the hash-marks of the New Frontier," reported the United Press.
"Walking, an almost forgotten art in this motor-made nation, suddenly became as important as goldfish swallowing once was," read an Associated Press dispatch.
"The big surprise was the reaction in the infinitely mysterious chemistry of the American people," said a story in _Newsweek._ "Citizens of all ages and conditions, mostly flabby, went after the 50-mile mark in one of the woolliest of pursuits since men first chased wild geese." |
In May 1963, a man named Paris Whitehead was walking along the trail in Shenandoah National Park when he looked up and saw an elderly woman walking toward him. She wore a hat, tennis shoes, and a plastic raincoat. She was carrying a bundle. She was so wild looking that he knew exactly who she was. Queen of the Appalachian Trail, Grandma Gatewood. He had heard all about her. He knew she had walked the trail twice and had slept in more homes than George Washington. He'd later tell a friend about the experience, and Ronald Strickland would write of the encounter in his book, _Pathfinder_ : "Knowing of her experience through all sections of the Trail, I asked her which part she liked best. 'Going downhill, Sonny,' she replied."
Late in the summer of 1964, Merrill C. Gilfillan, an Ohio conservationist who was doing a feature story for _Columbus Dispatch Magazine_ showed up at the Pinkham Notch Hut south of Gorham, New Hampshire. He had arranged to meet up there with Emma Gatewood, who was trying to finish hiking the Appalachian Trail for the third time. When she didn't show the first day, he was mildly concerned. His worry grew on the second day as temperatures in the valleys of the Presidential Range dropped below thirty degrees. The third day brought snow above the timberline and winds of fifty to sixty miles per hour. By the fourth day, he was truly alarmed. He spoke to the director of the Appalachian Mountain Club hut system, who began a radio check of the huts in an effort to find Grandma. He tried several times but couldn't track her down. The director felt it was time to ask for a search. He was just about to call the US Forest Service when he found her, at Mizpah Spring Shelter, a few miles above Crawford Notch. They'd meet soon. |
While Gilfillan waited on her to arrive, he watched as hundreds of hikers came and went. The hut master said some two hundred a day passed through. Most were college age, wearing the newest clothes and carrying the best backpacks and gear.
The contrast was remarkable as Emma appeared out of the spruce and walked through the rain, wearing a sheepskin vest and serviceable gloves she'd found on the trail, and carrying her sack over her shoulder. She was recognized by the younger hikers coming through. They flocked around her, asking questions about the trail, showing honest admiration.
She was damaged, though. She had fallen her first day out and hurt her knee. The injury slowed her so much she couldn't make it to shelter and slept outdoors that night. A few days later, she was attacked by a German shepherd, which bit her on the leg before she could drive it away with her stick. She still had a nasty wound.
What struck Gilfillan was that she was happy. The bumps and bites didn't seem to bother her. She wore a smile and a subtle look of determination. |
"After the hard life I have lived," she said, "this trail isn't so bad."
On September 17, 1964, having traversed again one of the most difficult A.T. stretches, through Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine; having survived the final day of walking on bullion cubes and a handful of peanuts; Emma Gatewood, seventy-seven, reached Rainbow Lake, a fitting place to complete her third hike, since she had walked there from Mount Katahdin ten years before, in 1954.
She was the first person to walk the entire trail three times.
The newspapers called her "the female hiking champion of the United States—maybe of the world" and "the famed hiker from Ohio" and "the nation's most famous woman hiker" and "a living legend among hikers." As was customary, she offered criticism, saying that the trail was bad in a few spots—but fewer than the last time she'd been through.
Asked why she liked to hike, she told reporters, "I took it up as kind of a lark."
She sold her house and used the money to buy a small trailer court back in the Gallia County town of Cheshire. The upkeep on the place was hard. Tenants left trash and rags and bottles outside, so she'd clean up and trim around the skirts with a butcher knife while they were away. When her gas mower broke down, she cut the grass with a push mower. She quilted and braided rugs and wrote letters and spoke at school assemblies and washed the windows at the Methodist church. |
She captured in her diary the extraordinary minutiae of her twilight.
May 19, 1967.
I took a mattock and shovel and worked on the road around the court; dug a ditch to let the water out, and dug the high places into the holes. Lifted the grass around where the well was dug and wheeled five loads of dirt and filled in. Then put the sod back and watered it and beat it down with the shovel. Put the block of walk back in place. Spaded and planted two hills of cukes, two of pumpkins, four hills of peanuts. Put a fence around to keep the rabbits out. Burned the trash. Got some asparagus down the track and picked lettuce and a few strawberries. Went to the P.O. Fixed the underpinning. And I'm tired.
She continued to travel, especially to annual conventions of the National Campers and Hikers Association, which sometimes drew ten thousand outdoorsmen, and she was routinely singled out by the press.
"People just can't believe an old woman is hiking," she told a reporter at the _Salina Journal_ at a meeting in Kansas. "No one would do a thing like that, they figure, unless she was getting paid for it. It's a funny thing. I work like a horse around the trailer court. But when I say I'm taking a hike, they say I shouldn't because I'm too old. I got up on the roof awhile back and sawed off a tree limb. But no one said anything about that." |
Back home, she began marking and blazing a hiking trail through Gallia County with the idea it would one day be connected to the Buckeye Trail, proposed to run between Cincinnati and Lake Erie. She scouted and cleared some thirty miles along the Ohio River, painting trees with robin's egg-blue blazes, two inches wide by six inches long. She negotiated with farmers for permission to cross their private property and built stiles out of logs and rock for climbing barbed-wire fences. At eighty-two, she could be found working on the trail from 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM, alone in the woods. "They said I was too old when I tried to get a job," she told a local reporter. "Why, I've done more since I was 'too old' than most young women."
_At a meeting of the National Campers and Hikers Association, 1965._ Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds
_Cincinnati, 1971._ Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds
For her work, Ohio Gov. James Rhodes gave her the State Conservation Award at the Ohio Achievement Day celebration at the fairgrounds in Columbus. She then flew to Fontana Dam, North Carolina, where she was a special guest at Fall Colors Hiking Week. |
Even with all the attention and honors, she continued to find peace in nature all by herself. She would stalk the countryside in search of rare flowers or a dogwood in full bloom. "I went to the hills today, looking for wild crabapples," she wrote to her daughter. "I found trailing arbutus all over the place, and a deep wooded gorge I would like to explore."
P. C. Gatewood fell ill in 1968. In his old age, he had been a doting grandfather, and had served as mayor of the tiny village of Crown City for several terms. He is remembered by many as a fair and hardworking man, and a loving grandfather and great-grandfather. His own children had limited contact with him. Several of them confronted him individually about what he had done to their mother, about what they had seen and heard. He claimed to have no memory of it. No one recalls whether P.C. ever mentioned Emma's notoriety, but they agree he must have known.
_Near Fontana Dam, 1970._ Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds
According to his son Nelson, he made one dying request in his final days. He wanted to see Emma. He wanted her to come stand in his doorway, just for a moment. |
The woman who had walked more than ten thousand miles since she left him refused to take those steps.
Her family did not attempt to keep tabs on her whereabouts. She'd simply disappear from Gallia County and return home with a new batch of stories.
"Saw an Indian on one of my hikes," she told a reporter in Huntington, chuckling, in 1972.
Last summer, up back of Rutland. I had climbed the ridge and started down the other side. Just as I placed a limb across the fence, I looked up and saw a man in the woods. He had a gun. I hadn't lived this long only to end up being shot in the woods, so I said, "Don't shoot. I'm Grandma Gatewood. I tromp these woods all the time." I could tell by his features that he was an Indian, at least part, and his expression showed that he had never heard of anyone by the name of Gatewood. Pretty soon another fellow came up. He told me they came from Portsmouth, were hunting grouse, and sure enough, the man with him was part Indian. "He knows more about the woods than anyone I know," he said. The first man smiled, looked at me and said, "I've seen lots of things in the woods but you're the most unusual sight I've ever come across." |
She added distance to her total tally until she had walked more than fourteen thousand miles, more than halfway around the earth, putting her in the slim company of astonishing pedestrians.
21
MONUMENTS
1973
If there was one place Emma loved, it was a deep and breathtaking sandstone gorge in the hills of southeastern Ohio, a place called Old Man's Cave, which was carved by streams and percolating ground-water. Through the gorge, the stream snakes through a gallery of features, including waterfalls and eddy pools, diving one hundred feet in half a mile. The moist and cool hollow preserves typically northern trees such as the eastern hemlock and Canada yew, which have survived since the glaciers retreated thousands of years ago.
In the winter, the falls freeze over, creating beautiful ice formations.
The gorge is called Old Man's Cave because it was once home to a recluse named Richard Rowe. Rowe had worked for his father's trading business on the Ohio River until the early 1800s, when he took to the woods to live in solitude. There came a time when he disappeared for several years and was presumed dead. But then he returned. He told an acquaintance he had walked to the Ozark Mountains to find his older brother, but learned he was dead. Rowe told his brother's widow that he had buried a stash of gold in a gorge in Hocking Hills, and that he would fetch it and return to take care of her. Back at his cave, he went out one morning to get a drink of water. He used the butt of his musket to break the ice and it discharged under his chin. Trappers found his body a few days later, wrapped him in bark and buried him on a sandy ledge at Old Man's Cave. |
"They're beautiful, those cliffs," Emma once said. "In fact, I think it's more interesting than anything I saw on the Appalachian Trail."
Every January, starting in 1967, she put on her red beret and led a six-mile hike through Hocking Hills, down by Old Man's Cave. People came from across the state. She made lots of new friends. In 1972, when she was eighty-four, it was her job again to lead, to set the pace, but she was having trouble coming down. Her legs bothered her below the knees, mostly down the back. She had been trying to work the pain away with exercise, but she couldn't overcome it. "I feel like taking off to the woods," she'd tell a woman a few months later, "but I don't know whether I'd get back." The trail by Old Man's Cave is steep in spots, and one must climb gnarled tree roots that grow alongside the path. Age was finally wearing her down. She tried to traverse the winter landscape and struggled.
When she could no longer do it safely, several men carried her over the rough spots. |
The following year, 1973, sensing it might be her last event, the organizers held the winter hike in her honor. They made her a hostess, and she stood at the trailhead in her signature beret, greeting her old friends. More than twenty-five hundred hikers showed up. At the lunch break, she was presented the Governor's Community Action Award for her "outstanding contributions to outdoor recreation in Ohio."
She took a bus trip that spring, with an open-ended eighty-five-dollar ticket, visiting forty-eight states and three Canadian provinces. She met friends or family nearly everywhere she went. She sent a postcard home in May. Pictured on the front was the Pennsylvania Turnpike, "the World's Most Scenic Highway." Her handwriting was shaky. "Am having a nice trip," she wrote. She stopped in Falls Church, Virginia, to visit Ed Garvey, who penned a popular book, _Appalachian Hiker: Adventure of a Lifetime,_ about his thru-hike in 1970. She told him about the night on top of a moss-covered mountain she couldn't remember the name of, when the stars looked like a million pinpricks of light in a blanket of darkness. |
"It was just as clear, and it looked like I could almost reach out and get the stars, and pull them down," she said. "Oh, I lay there and watched them. It looked so, it was so nice, and it was.... Oh, I enjoyed that night. The little old growth on there was just about so high and just as thick as it could be. There's a lot of little pines around there, and I got down, I got down to sort of break the wind, you know? I'll tell you, that was a nice night. I lay there and looked at those stars, and that moon."
On the last leg of the bus trip, in Florida, she felt air conditioning for the first time, and it was cold and unnatural upon her skin. She felt slightly ill when she got home in late May and blamed it on the artificial cool of the bus. It did not slow her. She prepared the earth for a garden, hoeing and tilling. She planted half runners, potatoes, nasturtiums, corn, and beans. She wrote some letters to distant family. She went to Sunday school and church and played a game of Scrabble with a friend. She cleaned around the flowerbed and swept the walk. She worked in her garden again on Saturday and called her son Nelson on Sunday to say she wasn't feeling well, that something was wrong—this from a woman who had been sick just once in her life. Nelson dispatched an ambulance and raced to the hospital, flanked by a sympathetic highway patrolman, and found his mother in a coma. |
The next morning, June 4, 1973, Nelson's wife and sister were sitting beside Emma's bed when she opened her eyes, closed them again, then hummed a few bars of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"— _Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord..._
The obituaries said she "gained national and world fame" for her hikes. One quoted her daughter Rowena, who told of how Emma had learned of the trail from a magazine article. "She said, 'If those men can do it, I can do it.'"
The Ohio Senate passed a resolution in her memory, noting her accomplishments, that she was a founder of the Buckeye Trail, and that she had "inspired many, particularly young people, toward an interest in and an appreciation for the outdoors and in the relationship between man and his natural environment."
They lowered Emma Rowena Gatewood into the ground on a pretty hillside in the Ohio Valley Memorial Gardens in Gallia County. Her marker says simply:
EMMA R. GATEWOOD GRANDMA
JUNE 7, 2012
Lucy Gatewood Seeds sits alone inside the lodge of a mountain resort in Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania, waiting for her family to dress for dinner. She stares out the large glass windows at the tall trees surrounding the lodge, listening for birds. She's not as good at identifying their songs as she once was, but if she listens long enough, the names come back. |
She wears her eighty-four years well. Her gray hair is cut short and her bangs curl toward her forehead. The top button is buttoned on her flowered blouse.
Most of her family is here. Two sons and a daughter, and three grandchildren. Her sister, Louise, will arrive soon.
Lucy spots a man walking down the pavement toward the lodge. He is bearded and wearing a large backpack, covered by a rain tarp. The man is soaking wet when he steps inside. He doesn't remove his pack, but stands near the door and shakes water from his hands.
Lucy waves and the man smiles back.
"Did you come from the trail?" she asks.
"Yes, ma'am," the man says. "Just now."
"I'm Lucy Gatewood Seeds," Lucy says as the man approaches. "Grandma Gatewood was my mother."
"You're kidding!" the man says, reaching out his hand. "I read about your mama and I just couldn't believe it. It just really moved me."
Lucy smiles.
"She did it three times, right?" the man asks.
"Two thru-hikes and once in sections," Lucy replies. "And she went from Mount Oglethorpe, not Springer Mountain, where the trail starts today. So it was a little longer." |
"She's one of the big reasons I'm here," he says. "I'm Stats."
"Hi, Stats," she says. "I'm Lucy."
She hugs the wet man like it doesn't matter.
"Grandma Gatewood," he says. "That's a name I haven't forgotten."
Stats's real name is Chris Odom and he's a physicist and former rocket scientist who now teaches physics at a Quaker boarding school. This is his eighty-seventh day on the trail and he decided to stay in the lodge, near the halfway point, because he's meeting his family soon. He first heard of the trail twenty-two years ago, in college, when he saw a map on the wall of his girlfriend's father's home. He asked about it, and the father sent him home with a two-volume set of books about the A.T. One of the stories was about Grandma Gatewood.
"Mrs. Emma Gatewood, better known along the trail as Grandma Gatewood, is probably the best-known of all the hikers who have completed the 2,000 miles of the Appalachian Trail," the story read. "Almost every through hiker has his favorite story about Grandma, which he has heard along the trail. She is the kind of personality about whom legends grow." |
He wants a photo with Lucy. They stand near the fireplace.
"Now, what did you think?" he asks Lucy. "You were a grown woman when she set out. Were you worried?"
"No, no, no," Lucy says. "My mother was amazing."
"She started the spark for me twenty-two years ago," Stats says. "Your mom's story just captivated me."
This is the amazing reality of Grandma Gatewood's legacy. Somehow her story became a motivating tale for those who came in contact with it, man or woman, regardless of generation. Her hikes brought attention to the trail like none before. That's true as well for Ken "Buckeye" Bordwell, wearing a long white beard and hiking boots, who introduces himself to Lucy. He first heard of the A.T. when his father read stories about Emma aloud at their home in Cincinnati. His father followed her progress in the newspapers, tuned in to the old woman walking. In junior high school, Ken started to fantasize about setting out himself.
"That was one of the things that put it in my mind and made me a sitting duck for the 'Appalachian Trail Disease,'" he said. "There are certain ones among us who hear about the A.T., and then it's all over." |
He started chipping off sections of the trail in 1965 and completed his final section last summer. "She helped many people become aware of the trail," Bordwell says. "She may have been one of the greatest publicists the trail ever had. A single, elderly woman, walking the whole thing? You can't buy publicity like that."
Gene Espy, the second thru-hiker, is here, too. The old Boy Scout hadn't heard about Grandma Gatewood's hikes until the 1970s, but they impressed him. He had trail guides, to say nothing of his pup tent and solid backpacking gear. "I thought that was a pretty good trick that she was able to carry her pack on her shoulder like that," he said. "You need your hands for climbing and whatnot. I thought it was a pretty good trick."
The reach of her story is hard to measure in any scientific way. But in the twenty years since the Internet brought us connectivity, many hikers have taken to journaling online about their outdoor experiences, and a search of one of the popular hosting sites— TrailJournals.com—turns up more "Grandma Gatewood" entries than you'd ever care to read. Some are calls to press forward— "Remember Grandma Gatewood!" and that kind of thing. Others speak to a deeper influence. |
"Back when I was just a kid, my family belonged to and was active in a group called the National Campers & Hikers Association. I met 'Grandma' Gatewood, when she was the guest of honor at the first NCHA convention that I attended with my parents and sister at Lake of the Ozarks State Park in Missouri," wrote a hiker called Granny Franny. "She led us kids on hikes around trails in the state park, and I really enjoyed this feisty old lady who hiked. 'When I grow up, I'm going to do that,' I told myself."
"Over the years the story of Grandma Gatewood has remained in my mind and served as inspiration when I thought about all the reasons why I might not be able to do this hike," wrote a woman called Rockie.
"On the way up to the top of Mt. Guyot, I encountered the spirit of Grandma Gatewood," wrote Gatorgump. "She approached me as I was gasping for breath and feeling faint. I recognized her immediately from old photographs."
Among those who study the trail, those who know its history inside and out, her legacy is indelible. "She drew a lot of attention to the Appalachian Trail," said Larry Luxenberg, author of _Walking the Appalachian Trail._ "Her hikes inspired a lot of people. No matter how bad your hike is, how difficult the trail is, you could always point to Grandma Gatewood and say, 'Well, she did it.'" |
Beyond the attention, and beyond her well-documented criticism that prompted better maintenance and upkeep, her hikes crumbled the psychological barrier that existed between the American public and this long path through the wilderness. She introduced people to the A.T., and at the same time she made the thru-hike achievable. It didn't take fancy equipment, guidebooks, training, or youthfulness. It took putting one foot in front of the other—five million times.
"She boasted that she was the only one of the thru-hikers of the Trail that really roughed it, and she was probably right," Ed Garvey said before he died. "She lacked most of the pieces of equipment that hikers consider absolutely essential, but she possessed that one ingredient, desire, in such full measure that she never really needed the other things."
Many A.T. scholars, Luxenberg included, point to Garvey as the man who turned on America to the thru-hike. It's true that his book, _Appalachian Hiker,_ which offered practical advice, was popular; when he died in 1999, it was in its third edition. The book— and Garvey's hike—also received a fair amount of attention from the popular press. Part of the reason so many point to Garvey's thru-hike in 1970 and his subsequent book as an A.T. turning-point is because the number of thru-hikers began to rise significantly around the same time. From 1936 to 1969, only fifty-nine completions were recorded. From 1970 to 1979, 760 completions were recorded—a huge spike. That doubled in the 1980s, then doubled again in the 1990s. Nearly six thousand people hiked the entire length of the A.T. between 2000 and 2009. And it all seemed to start with Garvey's book. |
But let's split hairs for a moment. In 1964, the year Emma Gatewood completed the entirety of the trail for the third time, four others finished as well. The following three years saw just eight completions. Then, in 1968, six hikers finished. In 1969, ten finished. Ten more completed the trail in 1970, the year of Garvey's hike. The surprise comes in 1971, when that number doubles—twenty-one people completed two-thousand-mile hikes that year, the most ever and more than double the number of two-thousand-milers from the year before. Here's the thing: it wasn't until December 1, 1971, after those twenty-one hikes were finished, that _Appalachian Hiker_ was released. So, with all due respect to the late Mr. Garvey, the spike started before his book.
"She opened the door of knowledge of the trail to the general public," said Robert Croyle, membership secretary for the Appalachian Trail Museum and an accomplished outdoorsman. "Her hike brought attention to the trail that was sorely needed. Interest in the trail that she created caused interest in maintaining the trail, and that's carried on through today." |
"She has become a folk icon and a symbol of the A.T. being for any American," said Laurie Potteiger, information services manager for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. "She is in a class by herself. Earl Shaffer has his own legacy, but in terms of a folk hero, she has a special place in A.T. history. Her story is immediately fascinating."
Lucy Gatewood Seeds is here in Boiling Springs with her family because Grandma Gatewood is being inducted into the Appalachian Trail Hall of Fame, and, in a way, Lucy is the keeper of the flame. She's the youngest of Emma's four surviving children, who have all lived good, long lives. Lucy has kept her mother's correspondence, journals, and photographs. She makes copies of newspaper clippings and journal entries and puts together scrapbooks to share with those who are interested. She has lent to museums her inherited memorabilia—old shoes, Band-Aid tins, and denim sacks. And she protects her mother's legacy. When Lucy learned that the author Bill Bryson had mentioned her mother in his best-selling book about the A.T., she found the passage, then found it unflattering. |
"Probably the most famous, certainly the most written about, of all thru-hikers was Emma 'Grandma' Gatewood," Bryson wrote, "who successfully hiked the trail twice in her late sixties despite being eccentric, poorly equipped, and a danger to herself. (She was forever getting lost.)"
Lucy fired off a letter to the witty writer, who hiked only 39.5 percent of the A.T. himself.
"Eccentric, perhaps, but kindly, please. Lost, never, just misdirected," she wrote. "I hope you have the satisfaction of completing the trail some day."
These are Lucy's moments. She was disheartened to learn that her mother wasn't in the inaugural Hall of Fame class, which included Myron Avery, Gene Espy, Ed Garvey, Benton MacKaye, Arthur Perkins, and Earl Shaffer. She let it be known. When the second class was announced, she was pleased.
"When I'm dead and gone," Emma told Lucy and Louise once, in a tone that was certain and not at all arrogant, "they're going to erect monuments to me."
She was right. In the Hall of Fame down the road, her wooden bust is on a mantle and a display case tells her story. She came to pioneer three separate groups of A.T. hikers: seniors, women, and "ultra-light," a style of minimalist hiking, carrying as little gear as possible, which has recently come into vogue. She was even the inspiration for a lightweight rain cape that doubles as a shelter—the Gatewood Cape. |
She also remains in elite company. Nearly four decades after her third A.T. jaunt, just eight women and fifty-five men have completed three two-thousand-mile hikes, according to Appalachian Trail Conservancy records.
"She was so proud of all she had done, and she had gotten so much public attention from it," said Louise. "She figured that it was going to be noteworthy and people were going to remember her."
When it's time for the ceremony, Lucy is ready. She has delivered versions of the same speech before, but this night is special. The hall at the Allenberry Resort Inn is packed with hikers, politicians, and philanthropists, those with interest in preserving the A.T. for the next generation. They speak of the trail's importance and its tentative future, how development threatens and protecting the wilderness is in everyone's interest. When they began speaking of the pioneers, Larry Luxenberg talks about Emma.
"Most women would have been content to live out their lives in comfort," he says. |
"Many call her the first thru-hiker celebrity," he says.
"She was a hiker for the ages," he says.
Lucy is called to the podium. The crowd sits silently.
"People call her Grandma Gatewood," Lucy says, "but I call her mamma."
They still ask.
Wherever Lucy goes, whenever Grandma Gatewood comes up in conversation, people want to know why she did what she did. No surprise there. The question in general has prompted at least one scholarly study, in 2007, called _Why Individuals Hike the Appalachian Trail: A Qualitative Approach to Benefits._ The researchers found that common reasons were the standard fare: being outdoors, hiking, the fun and enjoyment of life, warm relationships, physical challenge, camaraderie, solitude, and survival.
It's easy enough, I guess, to take Emma's various responses at face value. Maybe she never thought too long or hard about why she wanted to test herself against nature. Maybe the first time was a lark, as she said, or some primal need to see what was over the next hill, then the next. That might explain the first trip, but then she learned how difficult it was, how painful, how the rosy _National Geographic_ article had been wrong. |
And she did it again. And again. That's where my understanding begins to fall short. We could, of course, leave it at her being eccentric, as Bill Bryson wrote, but that's far too easy an explanation. She did, after all, keep good company on the trail, making friends who were very glad to see her on her return, and not in some sideshow kind of way. She was well read, well spoken, and white-gloves proper. It's true that she could twitch her gentility slightly to let you know you had done or said something of which she didn't approve. But to suggest she was eccentric is to suggest it would be strange for her to walk. We know that she couldn't drive, and that it wasn't out of the ordinary for her to walk five or ten miles to visit a friend in the course of her daily life. The long hikes were simply an extension of that, a means of getting from point A to point B. Eccentric? No.
Lucy believes that her mother wanted to be the first woman to thru-hike the trail, and that's worth thinking about. A minor problem with that theory arises when you consider that the story that introduced her to the trail was written in 1949, five years before she set out the first time, in '54. There's no indication that Emma saw or read anything about the trail in that span, so how would she have known whether another woman had completed the hike? Maybe Lucy is right in a general sense—but if being the first of her gender was the primary motivating factor, wouldn't she have made certain that no other woman had gone before her? |
I believe Emma Gatewood was honest. I also believe there's an equal chance that her stock answers were covers. They were honest—and also incomplete—responses to a question she couldn't bring herself to fully answer, not when she was a "widow." Not when she had a secret. Not when she had tasted her own blood, felt her ribs crack, and seen the inside of a jail cell. To suggest she was trying to be the first woman means believing that she was walking toward something. I'm not sure that's wholly true. I'm not sure she was walking toward something so much as walking away.
There's one response among the dozens that I've come to think best answers the question, a declarative sentence in the public record that is equal parts truth and defiance. It's a statement that betrays a secret at the same time. There's something both bold and hidden in the response. Something beautiful and independent, mysterious and brave. There is escape between the words. Escape from abuse and oppression. Escape from age and obligation. It ends with a period that might as well be a question mark, four words that launch a thousand ships, and it's an answer that frustrates and satisfies. |
"Because," she told a reporter, "I wanted to."
EPILOGUE
Before dawn on the third Saturday of January 2013, I drove Louise Gatewood LaMott from her condominium north of Columbus, Ohio, to Hocking Hills State Park, a few hours southeast. When we arrived, the lots surrounding the park were filling and families began piling out of cars and forming lines beside three or four school buses, which, when filled, ferried them down the hill to the trailhead.
The morning was downright cold, near freezing, and the hikers came prepared. They were bundled head to toe in the best gear— Patagonia, Columbia, the North Face, Eagle Creek, Camelbak. Keys dangled from carabiners and ski poles hung from wrists. They stuffed chemical hand-warmers into their pockets. I watched a middle-aged man and woman sit and strap spiked contraptions on the bottoms of their shoes, like snow chains for hiking boots.
Louise, God love her, was wearing a gray jacket, slacks, and low-top Nike sneakers. "I don't think I'll need my gloves," she said as we climbed out of the rental. She'll be eighty-seven in two months and as much as I wanted to, I wasn't going to second-guess her. ("My daughters treat me like a child," she had told me a few times before, more of a statement to me than an indictment of them.) |
When I flew into Columbus, it honestly hadn't occurred to me that she might want to accompany me to Hocking Hills. I had simply called to say hello, and see if I might swing by to visit before heading down to the forty-eighth-annual winter hike. But she insisted, and here she stood in the cold, clutching her mother's skinny stick. Forty years after Grandma Gatewood's last winter hike, her daughter was not going to miss it.
The other thing I hadn't expected was the crowd. I'm a fan of state parks, and I visit them often. I've seen full campsites at beautiful Big Bend down in southwest Texas and packed freshwater springs on hot Florida afternoons, but I've never in my life seen this many people occupy one park at the same time. The scene—minus the camouflage coveralls and checkerboard hunting caps—looked like a rock concert. Thousands had come—young and old, skinny and obese. Cars were packed on the grass in all directions. Walking down a single row, I saw license plates from West Virginia, Illinois, Michigan, Kentucky, and, strangely, New Mexico. I half-expected to find a carnival stand selling funnel cakes. |
We stood in the cold for thirty minutes before we could get on one of the buses. When we got to the trailhead, _there was a line._ I can't emphasize this enough. To get onto the trail near Old Man's Cave, there was a queue like you'd find at the most popular roller coaster at an amusement park. People were waiting on the buses, then waiting at the trailhead one-hundred-deep... _to take a walk._ To see nature. To descend from level ground down to Old Man's Cave, to a geographically secretive underground world with these huge _Jurassic_ Park-like trees, these gorgeous waterfalls and blackhand sandstone recesses made slowly, particle by particle, over thousands of years.
That morning, I guessed out loud that there were three thousand others walking with us. I'd learn later that 4,305 people showed up to hike six miles. Think about that for a minute.
Many of them wore patches that said GRANDMA GATEWOOD HIKE. A big boulder was planted at the trailhead, where the clogged line waited for a bottleneck to clear. A large metal plaque affixed to the rock said: |
GRANDMA GATEWOOD MEMORIAL TRAIL THIS SIX-MILE TRAIL IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF GRANDMA GATEWOOD, A VIBRANT WOMAN, SEASONED HIKER, AND LONG-TIME HOCKING HILLS ENTHUSIAST. THE PATH BEGINS HERE, VISITS CEDAR FALLS, AND TERMINATES AT ASH CAVE. JANUARY 17, 1981
I thought of what Louise had told me about her mother. "When I'm dead and gone," Emma said, "they're going to erect monuments to me." She knew. The Grandma Gatewood Trail has come to be part of the cross-state, twelve-hundred-mile Buckeye Trail, part of the forty-six hundred-mile federal North Country Trail that runs from New York to North Dakota, and part of the American Discovery Trail that covers sixty-eight-hundred miles from Delaware to California.
We slowly and carefully snaked into the gorge, down a series of slopes and worn steps set in stone as trail volunteers sprinkled rock salt at our feet to melt the snow and ice. Even in a crowd, this felt like sacred ground. There was no question why Emma liked this place so much, why she thought it was the most interesting geographical feature she'd seen. Old Man's Cave is a recess in the side of a cliff, about seventy-five feet above the rushing stream. And it's big—250 feet long and about 50 feet high. |
"You might have to put me on your back," Louise said.
I was ready to, but she braved the stone steps and icy bridges like a younger woman. I imagined her mother doing the same thing on her final hike, with men reaching out to steady her, to carry her over the rough patches.
Thinking of that scene makes me whimper. We had spoken with a man in line earlier who had participated in this same hike for more than thirty years. He couldn't explain what keeps him coming back, but I think I know. I think I know why Louise insisted on coming, and I think I know why I booked a plane ticket on a moment's notice, just twenty-four hours before. I think I know why all these people line up by that big plaque on the boulder every year and funnel—baby step-by-baby step—onto the Grandma Gatewood Trail. To be here is to participate in an experience, _her_ experience. To walk this path that she loved is to embrace her memory, to come as close to her as possible. To see what she saw and step where she stepped and feel some thin connection to a farm woman who decided one day to take a walk, and then kept going, getting faster until the end. I could be imagining all this, but I lost myself a little. In her footsteps, I forgot my troubles. Maybe the fountain of youth wasn't a fountain at all. |
Louise made it over her mother's trail just fine. I held her arm through the icy patches, but she didn't need it. I drove her back to Columbus, and we agreed to do it again next year.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I may not have known about Grandma Gatewood if it weren't for my mother, Donna Burruss, handing down the stories she inherited. I remember them fondly, dreamy tales of adventure and mystery. Conversations with her siblings, especially Lou Terry, helped immensely.
Thanks to Emma's surviving children, Louise, Rowena, Nelson, and especially Lucy, who all opened their homes and sacrificed many hours of their time to help me understand their mother as they knew her. They also kindly granted me access to her correspondence, photographs, and journals without asking anything in return. I'm in their debt.
Thanks to Bill Duryea and Kelley Benham for their advice and feedback, and to Michael Kruse, who was always willing to listen. My other generous colleagues at the _Tampa Bay Times_ were understanding when I blew deadlines or disappeared because of book work, and they offered tons of unsolicited encouragement and advice. They are Neil Brown, Mike Wilson, Leonora LaPeter Anton, Lane DeGregory, Jeff Klinkenberg, Laura Reiley, Janet Keeler, Eric Deggans, Craig Pittman, and Mary Jane Park. John Capouya, Tom French, Neil Swidey, Michael Brick, Hank Stuever, Chris Jones, Earl Swift, and Matthew Algeo helped me understand what makes a good book, and how to sell it. Speaking of selling it, my agent Jane Dystel held my hand through the entire daunting process. |
There's no finer linear community in America than the folks who know, love, and preserve the Appalachian Trail. I can't possibly thank all the people who opened their homes to me, gave me rides, or helped me find my way along the trail, but I'd like to thank Laurie Potteiger, Larry Luxenberg, Paul Sannicandro, Robert Croyle, Betsy Bainbridge, Paul Renaud, Gene Espy, Peter Thomson, and Bjorn Kruse. Thanks, too, to a handful of librarians in small towns and cities along the trail who helped track down old stories about Emma's journey.
Finally, this book would not be possible without my wife, Jennifer, who kept me organized and took care of our family while I chased Emma Gatewood's ghost across the country. She even climbed Mount Katahdin on an injured ankle to see the journey complete. My children, Asher, Morissey, and Bey, deserve credit as well for asking a thousand times: "Are you done with the book yet, Daddy?"
Yes, I am.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Agee, James, and Walker Evans. _Let Us Now Praise Famous Men_. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1939. |