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Tiger Research 66

_You have credentials?_ the man asked. She fetched her social security card from her sack and handed it over. He studied the card as the mutt that followed her down the hollow sniffed out a comfortable spot on the porch. Emma fished out some pictures of her family, her children and grandchildren, and presented those, too, for further proof that she was who she said she was. But the man was suspicious. _Is Washington paying you to make this trip?_ the man asked. _No,_ Emma said. She told him she was doing it for herself, and she had every intention of hiking all 2,050 miles of it, to the end. She just needed a place to spend the night. _Does your family approve of what you're doing?_ asked he. _They don't know,_ said she. He regarded her, an old woman in tapered dungarees and a button-up shirt, her long, gray hair a mess. Her thin lips and fat, fleshy earlobes. Her brow protruding enough to shade her eyes at their corners. She hadn't seen a mirror in days, but she reckoned she looked hideous. _You'd better go home, then,_ he said. _You can't stay here._

There wasn't any use in fighting. She knew where she was. She hefted her sack onto her shoulder again, turned her back on the man and his worn-out wife, and started walking. 2 GO HOME, GRANDMA MAY 10–18, 1955 The Cherokees were gone, most of them relocated at gunpoint to Oklahoma, but their stories still whipped through the passes of the ancient Blue Ridge Mountains of North Georgia. In the beginning, as the native creation story had it, the earth hung from the heavens by four cords and the surface of the earth was covered by water until a beetle dived down and brought up mud, creating land, which spread in every direction. One by one, emissaries visited from the sky realm to see if the earth was inhabitable, until a great vulture made an exploratory trip. When he tired, he flew so low his wings brushed the earth, punching valleys on the down thrust and bringing forth mountains, these mountains, on the updraft. When the land finally dried and plants and animals came they were given instructions to stay awake for seven nights, to keep watch over their new habitat. Nearly all were awake the first night, but several had fallen asleep by the next, and more by the third, and then others. By the seventh night, only the pine, spruce, laurel, holly, and cedar plants had stayed awake to the end, and they were rewarded medicinal properties and evergreen foliage; the rest were punished and made to lose their "hair" each winter. Of the animals, only the panther, owl, and a few others remained alert; they received the power to see in the dark, to own the night.

Darkness was falling. Emma walked as fast as she could, feeling alone, and the trail carried her over the mountain until she finally found a narrow logging road and hurried down it, keeping in the middle, until she came upon some large machinery and a shed about 10:30 PM. She crept inside, spread her blanket on the floor, and secured the door. She heard dogs barking, then a pickup truck, but she stayed still. In the morning, when she finally woke, she stepped outside. In the soft light of dawn, she could see that she'd found her way into the middle of a summer camp, but it appeared to be vacant, no camp counselors blowing whistles and no children doing morning exercises. Her own children had no idea she was here. She wasn't even sure if all eleven of them knew about the Appalachian Trail, or how the footpath had been calling her, how she'd been captivated by the fact that no woman had yet hiked it alone. They knew she loved to walk, that she'd stalk through the hills of Gallia County, awed by the stillness and quiet of the forests. They remembered stomping through the woods with her when they were young, when she'd urge them to listen for birdsongs and teach them to watch for snakes around blackberry bushes and point out the medicinal properties of wild plants, as if she were preparing them for their own journeys.

Her resolve, hardened by years of white-knuckle work, was intact. She trod along, through the ferns and galax, ground cedar and May apple, through great patches of oak and hickory and poplar trees. The flowers were popping: the bloodroot, trillium, violets, bluets, lady's slipper, and beardtongue. As she approached the edge of the forest she saw something that beckoned her on, something she wouldn't see again for another two thousand miles, like a gift from the Cherokee: a pink dogwood. She had told no one of her plans for the long walk that year, for fear they'd worry or try to stop her. She hadn't even told them about the year before, about her failure. That would be her secret, too, a pact between her and God and the park rangers in the Maine wilderness who saved her life. She first laid eyes on the trail in a doctor's office back home, inside a discarded _National Geographic_ from August 1949, and the nineteen-page spread with color photographs was a window to another place. The photos showed a bear cub clinging to a tree by a trail blaze, shirtless men scrambling up lichen-speckled boulders above the tree line in Maine, teenaged hikers atop rocks at Sherburne Pass in Vermont, hikers on an overlook at Grandeur Peak, a "girl hiker" inching through a crevice near Bear Mountain in New York. She read that a hiker in the Great Smoky Mountains had looked down into a deep canyon and had seen a lank man hoeing a corn patch. The steep cliffs made the hollow seem inaccessible, so the hiker shouted, "How'd you get down there?" "Don't know," came the reply. "I was born yere."

She read that the "soul-cheering, foot-tempting trail" was as wide as a Mack truck, that food was easy to come by, and that trailside shelters were plentiful and spaced within a day's walk from one another. "The Appalachian Trail, popularly the 'A.T.,' is a public pathway that rates as one of the seven wonders of the outdoorsman's world," the article gushed. "Over it you may 'hay foot, straw foot' from Mount Katahdin, with Canada on the horizon, to Mount Oglethorpe, which commands the distant lights of Atlanta." The old woman had been captivated. "Planned for the enjoyment of anyone in normal good health," it read, "the A.T. doesn't demand special skill or training to traverse." By the time the article was published in 1949, just one man, a twenty-nine-year-old soldier named Earl V. Shaffer, had officially reported hiking the trail's entire length in a single, continuous journey. In the seven years since Shaffer's celebrated hike, only five others had achieved the same. All were men. Emma intended to change that.

"I thought that although I was sixty-six," she would write later in her diary, "I would try it." She didn't tell anyone what she planned to do and she gathered what she thought she could not do without, not what one was supposed to take on a two-thousand-mile hike. Those who had come before arrived with mail-order rucksacks and sleeping bags and tents and mess kits. Not Emma. Her little sack weighed seventeen pounds. Since it was July 1954 by the time she was ready to set out on the five-month journey, she decided to start in the north and race the cold south. She caught the 6:15 AM Greyhound out of Gallia County for Pittsburgh, and there caught the New York Express to Manhattan, then another bus to Augusta, Maine, arriving early the following morning. She caught another bus from Augusta to Bangor and checked into the Hotel Penobscot for the night and gave the man behind the counter $4.50. The next morning, July 10, she caught a cab to Pitman camp and arrived about 10:30 AM, then climbed Mount Katahdin, the northern terminus of the trail. Three and a half hours later she was back down, just before dark. A young couple invited her to share broiled hot dogs and pea beans baked with molasses and salt pork. Then she spread her blanket and drifted off to sleep under a lean-to at Katahdin Stream Campground, where the creek sings all night.

The next morning, before the sun peeked into the valley, she left her suitcase with a park ranger, gave him a dollar, and asked him to send it back to Ohio. Then she set off for York Camp, a sporting cabin on the west branch of the Penobscot River. A few miles in, she realized she had packed too many clothes so she emptied her bag, stuffed her extras into a box, and asked the folks at York Camp to mail them back to Ohio. She hiked from there to Rainbow Lake, some thirteen miles farther, and a nice family at the campgrounds treated the bedraggled old woman to roast beef and pie. She decided to take the next day off and stayed two nights. The next morning she started early. When she came to a weather-rotted sign, she took the wrong trail. She didn't know that the Appalachian Trail was marked with white blazes and wound up walking far off course. Just before noon, she popped out of the forest and into a patch of bracken and realized she had lost her way. She searched for an hour and a half in the wilderness but couldn't find the path. She climbed a knoll in an open space and built a fire and lay on the ground. She whistled and sang a little and nibbled on the raisins and peanuts she'd brought along.

"I did not worry if it was to be the end of me," she wrote in her diary. "It was as good a place as any." After lunch, she went in search of water and disappeared deeper into the wilderness, following game trails through thick summer vegetation. As night fell, she found a rock and lay down to try to rest. When bands of rain blew through, she stood until they passed. She tried more paths the next morning, exerting precious energy on a second wasted day, none leading her to the trail she had taken in, her food supply running short. She uprooted bracken to make a bed under an overturned rowboat she found leaning against some evergreen trees. She lit a fire, filled a coffee can with water, and doused the flames, hoping the smoke signals would alert other hikers or the rangers at Baxter State Park, but no one came. She decided to take a bath in a small pond and she placed her eyeglasses on a rock. She forgot where she'd put them, and took a bad step, crushing a lens. She tried to patch it with a Band-Aid, but she could barely see.

She kept the fire going a few more hours, until eleven o'clock, but the wood was running short and she was growing tired. She ate the last of her food and lay down to rest, covering her face to keep the black flies away. Then she heard it. An airplane came into view, flying low above the trees, the thump of its propeller echoing off the mountains. She jumped to her feet and waved a white cloth to try to flag the plane. And then it was gone. She lay back down and closed her eyes. She was out of food, and almost out of hope, lost in a vast wilderness not even thirty miles from where she had begun. What would she say when she got back home, if she made it back home? What would she tell people? She didn't know it, but the ranger at Rainbow Lake had radioed the next camp, eight miles away, asking for an update when Emma arrived. When she didn't come, the foresters launched a search. Emma looked around for wood sorrel, which could be eaten for nourishment, but couldn't find any. Nor could she find early chokeberries, blueberries, or cranberries, which had yet to bloom. She decided to try to find the trail one more time. She collected her things and started back the way she had come. By luck or miracle, she found the path back toward the camp and set off. She hiked for hours and finally arrived at Rainbow Lake by 7:00 PM, where she found a group of men throwing horseshoes.

Four Baxter State Park rangers had been frantically searching for her. They'd come across her camp while she was out scouting and they found traces of her fire. They had combed the woods, calling out for her, but she never heard them. _Welcome to Rainbow Lake,_ one of the men said. _You've been lost._ _Not lost,_ Emma said. _Just misplaced._ The rangers, all men, were annoyed. They started telling her she should go home. _I wouldn't want my mother doing this,_ one of them said. She had broken glasses, no food, and not much money. Maybe they were right. Maybe she should quit. Two of the rangers helped her into their monoplane and flew her to a nearby lake where the Baxter Park superintendent was waiting. He took her to the railroad station in Millinocket and put her on a train back to Bangor where she staggered through the streets, people casting sideways glances her way, and into the Penobscot Hotel, the same place she'd stayed seven long days before. The man behind the counter said the hotel was full.

_Have you tried any other place?_ he asked. No, she said. _I stayed here last week._ The man scratched around in some papers on the counter. _They won't want that room tonight,_ he said. _You can have it._ A bellboy escorted Emma upstairs. _Don't you remember me?_ she asked him. _Yes,_ he said. _I've been climbing mountains,_ she said. She closed her door and dropped her bag and walked to the mirror. She barely recognized the woman staring back at her. Broken glasses. A black fly had bit her near the eye and it was bruised. Her sweater was full of holes. Her hair was a mess. Her feet were swollen. She thought she looked like a drunk out of the gutter. A vagabond. A sixty-six-year-old failure. She'd tell no one about this. This time would be different. She had learned hard lessons. She had been on the trail eight days when she caught a ride, from a man and woman named Jarrett who were picking up fertilizer near where a truck had spilled its load. They allowed her to stay the night at their home and drove her back to the trail the next morning, to the same spot from which she'd left, and sent her packing with a mess of corn pone. She walked twenty miles that day, finally reaching Hightower Gap as a spring thunderstorm moved in. She made her bed on some boards under a cement picnic table, but she rolled back and forth all night, trying helplessly to stay out of the rain.

She set off the next morning and at long last, on May 14, she crossed the state line and left Georgia behind. She started up the first mountain in North Carolina and the sun beat down upon her neck. She was tired. She raked together a bed of leaves and settled in for a nap; when she woke, she felt a little like Rip Van Winkle. That afternoon, as another storm approached, she heard a cowbell clanking in the forest and a man calling hogs in the distance. She thought there might be a place to stay nearby, but when she walked down into the gap she didn't see a soul. No homes. No hogs. She was walking through a part of the world that was full of secrecy and distrustful of outsiders, the broad and beautiful setting for a never-ending game of cat-and-mouse between the people of the hills and the government stiffs. In these secluded hills, a man could scrape out only a meager living through lawful ways. If he wanted to get ahead, he needed more than a few hogs and a rocky plot of corn. The mountains were both a curse and a blessing, though, and the thick woods, tall peaks, and skinny valleys provided natural coverage for an assortment of clandestine entrepreneurialism. Chief among them was moonshining. It started with the water, pure and cold, which bubbled up endlessly out of limestone springs. It was aided by the blue haze that hung low and camouflaged the hickory smoke from the fires that cooked the mash. So out flowed secret streams of illegal moonshine, 100-proof white lightning, in the trunks of jalopies destined for the big cities of the Midwest— Detroit, Chicago, and Indianapolis. The local lawmen tended to look the other way. Cutting stills was impolitic. The state, however, saw opportunity—specifically the opportunity to tax and tax often. And if it couldn't tax, it could handcuff—and thus raged a battle that occasionally sent bullets whizzing through these hollers.

Emma was a teetotaler. She didn't even drink coffee, and she took great pride in that fact, making a point to turn it down outright, a hidden lecture buried in her refusal. But she knew of the battles that had seized the region and she tried to be careful as she plodded through. She was startled when a man stepped from behind a tree. _Are there any houses around here?_ she asked. _Not around here,_ he said. The man introduced himself as Mr. Parker, and another man walked up to them, Mr. Burch. They told her they had been checking on their hogs, which roamed free in the woods, each wearing a cowbell, and they were camping at a lean-to a few miles away. If she could walk there, she was welcome to stay, they said. They seemed nice enough. She agreed, and Mr. Burch took her pack and carried it toward the shelter. When they arrived, another man, Mr. Enloe, joined them. They gave Emma straw for a bed and let her dry her wet clothes by their fire. In the morning, two of the men left after breakfast and said they'd return by dinner, leaving Emma alone with Mr. Burch. She had decided to take the day off to give her aching legs time to recover. They asked her to make cakes out of the stewed potatoes left over from breakfast, so she mixed the potatoes with flour and eggs and fried the loose patties in a skillet over the fire. She'd come to the trail for solidarity with nature, for peace, and here she was, doing chores for a group of men.

That afternoon, the forest warden and game warden stumbled upon Emma and Mr. Burch. They thought Emma was Burch's wife. She was embarrassed, but didn't correct them. She didn't want to explain what she was doing out on the trail. She didn't want to talk about why she was walking, or what she had walked away from. He found her in the dark. She was walking home from church in Crown City, Ohio, on a chilly night. He rode up beside her on his horse, Dick. Her cousin, Carrie Trowbridge, knew him from town and introduced them. P. C. Gatewood was the catch of Gallia County, Ohio. He was slender, with a soft tan complexion and short brown hair. He was a strident Republican, and he came from plutocrats—regional royalty, or at least they presented themselves in that fashion. His family owned a furniture factory in Gallipolis. At twenty-six, he was eight years older than Emma, and he seemed worldly, aristocratic even. He had earned a teaching degree from Ohio Northern University, making him one of a handful in the region with a college diploma, and he taught children to read and write at the one-room school-house nearby.

He asked if she wanted a ride and she accepted. He helped her up onto Dick. She had never ridden behind a man before, and as they galloped down the road she could scarcely stay on the horse. There was no way she was going to put her hands around P.C.'s waist. He carried her home several times that winter, through the barren trees that cast crooked shadows on the hollows, but she never grew bold enough to slide her hands around his body. That wouldn't be proper. One night, she fell off—slid right off the back of the animal. P.C. stopped long enough to give her a hand back on. Winter turned to spring and P.C. began making more advances. Emma hadn't spent much time thinking about a future with him, but in March he suddenly grew more serious. Out of the blue, he asked her to marry him. For the life of her, she couldn't understand why he was rushing. He seemed to want to get married right away. She wasn't ready. She bided her time and put him off for two months. They'd come from different lives, raised in close proximity but worlds apart. She'd been born in October 1887, in a puny house near Mercerville, a mile from where the creek forked. The house had a barn, a well, and a terrible view of an ugly bluff, but the children played over the hills. There were twelve in all at the time, and their parents shoved them off to the one-room Cofer School when they didn't have chores at home, which was rarely.

Her father, Hugh Caldwell, was a Civil War veteran, Union tried and true, whose parents had come from Scotland to farm. He was famous for having raised his head above a stone wall in the heat of battle to see where the enemy was. He was wounded later and then lost his bad leg, and after the war he was considered an old reprobate with an affinity for gambling and a taste for whiskey. Her mother, Evelyn Esther Trowbridge, was of British decent, offspring of a clan of Trowbridges who came to America in the 1620s. She was not far removed from Levi Trowbridge, who fought in Capt. Thomas Clark's Derby Company in the Revolutionary War, and with the Green Mountain Boys under General Ethan Allen. Emma had lived a dozen lives by eighteen. She still bore the scars from the day her sister, Etta, was heating water to wash in a kettle and a spark jumped out of the fire and caught Emma's clothes. Her mother applied medicine with a feather. Emma ate fruit from the blackhaw tree and chased her cousin around the barn. When her family moved to Platform, in Lawrence County, near Guyan Creek, her father intended to build a new house. He set the stone but never got around to erecting the rest. They stayed instead in a log cabin, and her father built an extra bedroom on the front porch. The children slept four to a bed, and in the winter the snow on the clapboard roof would blow in on them and they'd shake the covers before it could melt. They peed off the front porch when their parents weren't looking.

Her mother birthed three more children in that house, making fifteen in all, ten girls and five boys. On hot afternoons, they waded into the creek to get their clothes wet before they took to the fields to hoe corn or plant beans or worm and sucker tobacco or harvest sugar cane and wheat. They'd work until their clothes had dried, then repeat the cycle. Once, when Emma was instructed to plant pumpkins, she grew tired of the monotonous chore and planted handfuls of seeds in each hill. Every plant came up and her little secret was out. On Sunday mornings, they put on their best clothes and walked a mile to Platform to Sunday school, and after church, the children would climb into the fingers of young trees and ride them to the ground. They hunted wildflowers and climbed all the cliffs they could find, and on one they held firm to a bush and rappelled down its face to peek into a small cave. Once, Emma's older sisters told her she could catch sparrows at the cattle barn if she threw a little salt on their tails. For hours she worked that Sunday, trying to salt the birds' tails.

The children would take a jug of water and set it by a bumblebee nest, then punch the nest. The bees flitted out of the nest and went straight into the jug, and the children plunged their hands into the nest for raw honey. They went to school just four months a year, due to their farm work, and sometimes that dwindled to two. A gander stood guard outside Guyan Valley School, and when he saw the kids coming he'd stretch out his neck and flap his wings and hiss. Occasionally he'd make contact and bring tears. In 1900, when Emma was thirteen, her father sold the farm and bought another on the Wiseman's side of Raccoon Creek, a mile above Asbury Methodist Church and a mile below the Wagner post office. They sent the children to Blessing to school, but all were behind in their grades. They tried hard and finally caught up, but the school only went to eighth grade. When Emma was seventeen, her father fell at work and broke his good leg. Her mother took him to Gallipolis and he was hospitalized for two months. Emma stayed home from school and did the work. She milked the cow before breakfast and did the washing on Saturdays. The boys killed hogs and Emma had to make the sausage, lard, and head cheese. Her mother was surprised that things were in such good order when she returned. Emma had done all the mending, cooking, and cleaning, too.

In 1906, when she was eighteen, she left home for eight weeks to work as a housemaid in Huntington, West Virginia, across the Ohio River. She hated it and came home as soon as she could. That summer, her cousin Carrie Trowbridge asked her to come and stay with Mrs. Pickett, her grandmother, who lived near Sugar Creek. Mrs. Pickett paid Emma seventy-five cents a week and she was responsible for the milking, washing on the board, ironing, cleaning, shelling corn for the chickens, bringing in coal for the cooking, and washing dishes. _Emma, third from left, in front of Blessing School in Green Township, around age seventeen._ Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds That's when she met P.C. There she was, away from home, him asking her to marry and her keeping him at arm's length. But he'd had enough of this game of hard-to-get. He threatened to leave, to head west and never come back, if she refused to be his wife. She begrudgingly said yes. She quit school and collected some clothes and went to her aunt Alice Pickett's house, where Perry was waiting with her uncle, Asa Trowbridge. On May 5, 1907, the two exchanged vows and Emma Caldwell became Mrs. P. C. Gatewood.

They celebrated with a large dinner, then rode in a covered buggy up the Ohio River to Gallipolis and out to her mother's place above Northup, where they spent their honeymoon night in a room fashioned out of bedsheets, before heading up to the little log cabin he owned on a hillside above Sugar Creek. It wasn't long before the honeymoon was over. P.C. began treating Emma as a possession, demanding she do his work. Mopping, building fences, burning tobacco beds, mixing cement. It wasn't what she had in mind, but she tried hard to make the best of it. They were married three months before he drew blood. Standing Indian Mountain jutted from the earth nearly a mile, the highest point on the trail south of the Great Smokies. Emma, after a full day of rest and a good night's sleep on a bed of hay in the lean-to, saying farewell to the men and pigs, and having a breakfast of leftover potato cakes, pushed forward, canvas Ked in front of canvas Ked, until she crested the mountain in the mid-morning.

_P.C. and Emma Gatewood, shortly after their marriage._ Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds The mountain was named by the Cherokee, who told of a great winged creature that made its home here. A bolt of lightning shattered the mountain and killed the creature, but it also struck a warrior, who was turned to stone. The mountain was named on account of a peculiar rock formation that used to jut from the bald precipice and looked very much like a man. It took her an hour and a half to ascend, and behind her was a superb view of the Georgia Blue Ridge Mountains from which she'd come, through Deep Gap and Muskrat Creek and Sassafras Gap and Bly Gap. She needed to doctor her feet, but it was too early to stop, and even without a map she knew the toughest part of the journey so far was just ahead of her. After a long trek through Beech Gap and Betty Creek Gap she began to climb Mount Albert, scrambling much of the way over steep rocks, and it was indeed the hardest climb yet in the thirteen days she'd been hiking.

That evening, after twenty miles of walking, she ventured two miles off the trail to find a place to stay. She discovered an empty lean-to at White Oak Forest Camp. The night was cold and she tried to build a fire, but her matches were wet and would not strike. She squirmed into a corner of the shelter and shivered under the blanket until she fell asleep. She was greeted by rain the next morning, so rather than set off she walked to the game warden's house and introduced herself. The warden's name was Waldroop, and he and his wife drove Emma two miles back to the trail on their way to town. She started off slow, rain falling all day, and she arrived at Wayah Camp at 4:00 PM and built a small fire to dry her clothes. The nearest lean-to had an earthen floor, which was cold, so she heated a long board over the fire and rested atop it for warmth. When the board cooled, she did it again. She left ten minutes after six the next morning, greeted by the early birds of the Nantahala—a Cherokee word meaning "land of the noonday sun"—a vast and dark forest visited by Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto in the sixteenth century and the naturalist William Bartram in the eighteenth. When Bartram came through, he "beheld with rapture and astonishment a sublimely awful scene of power and magnificence, a world of mountains piled upon mountains." He continued:

The mighty cloud now expands its sable wings, extending from North to South, and is driven irresistibly on by the tumultuous winds, spreading his livid wings around the gloomy concave, armed with terrors of thunder and fiery shafts of lightning; now the lofty forests bend low beneath its fury, their limbs and wavy boughs are tossed about and catch hold of each other; the mountains tremble and seem to reel about, and the ancient hills to be shaken to their foundation: the furious storm sweeps along, smoking through the vale and descending from the firmament, and I am deafened by the din of thunder; the tempestuous scene damps my spirits, and my horse sinks under me at the tremendous peals, as I hasten for the plains. Here walked a new pioneer, her swollen feet inside worn-out tennis shoes, climbing up to Wayah Bald, and up the steps of a stone fire tower built twenty years before by the Civilian Conservation Corps, spinning now, absorbing the breathtaking views of the surrounding range, the world of mountains piled upon mountains, alone, happy.

3 RHODODENDRON AND RATTLESNAKES MAY 19–31, 1955 The hiking past Wayah Bald was difficult. The trail was unkempt and not well marked. By the time she crossed the Nantahala River on a railroad bridge she was growing hungry, but her supplies were gone. She ventured off the trail and found a small sassafras tree in the forest. She picked the tender young leaves from the tips of its branches and made a salad. Nearby, she found a bunch of wild strawberries. They were tart, but nice. The path to Wesser Bald had been washed out by the creek and the muck made walking difficult. She stopped at a little trailside store to restock, buying a quart of milk, some cheese crackers, fig bars, two eggs, and a pocketknife. She'd lost her old knife somewhere along the trail. The next morning, she began her ascent of Swim Bald, which took about three and a half hours, but just before she reached the top, she slipped on a slick boulder, fell, and broke her walking cane. She picked herself up off the rock and checked to see if everything was in order. It was, and she pressed on. She found a new walking stick and crested Cheoah Bald by 10:30 AM. She came down through Locust Cove Gap and Simp Gap and Stecoah Gap and Sweetwater Gap and, growing tired, looked for a place to sleep. There were no shelters, and a tall mountain loomed before her. The sun was fading, so she found a bare spot along the trail, built a fire, and settled in to rest for the night.

She was surrounded by unfamiliar territory, alone in a foreign place, full of curiosity and also dread and fear of the unknown. She hadn't seen another soul on the trail since the men, days before. Most of her routine had been set in the deep solitude of a southern spring, surrounded by a nature very much alive, by chirping birds and buzzing insects, but uninterrupted by human activity. That was about to change. The stretch of fertile farmland along the Ohio River in Gallia County was dotted by white wooden houses built snug against the hillsides, the occasional tin-roofed barn beckoning you to CHEW MAIL POUCH TOBACCO. People marked time here by floods and snowstorms, and they kept track of their lineage on the front pages of their Holy Bibles. Their ancestors were French Royalists, and they had been swindled. Five hundred noblemen, artisans, and professionals had bought parcels in Ohio, sight unseen, from a sham company, and they sped west across the Atlantic in January 1790. Upon arrival they learned they owned nothing but paper. Most of them left within two years, but the twenty families that remained etched out a harsh and uncertain living until settlers from Massachusetts and Virginia joined them and set about building a stable community a stone's throw from the river. They called it Gallipolis, "the city of Gauls."

A century later, the town had a newspaper and electric streetcars, a hospital and a library. Trains rolled through daily and steamboats slogged by on the Ohio River and preachers set up big tents in parking lots to holler about temperance. South of town, in a cabin on Sugar Creek, Emma Gatewood learned she was pregnant with her first child not long before her new husband struck her for the first time. He smacked her with an open hand, and the sharp sting of his palm on her cheek stunned her, frightened her. She thought of leaving him that day and that night and on into the next, but where would she go? She had no paying job, no savings, and her education had ended in the eighth grade. She couldn't return home and be a burden on her mother, who remained busy rearing children. So she bit her tongue and stayed with P.C. In October 1908, she delivered her first child, Helen Marie. P.C. wanted boys, and told her as much, so she gave birth again the following year, 1909, and again the child was female. They named her Ruth Estell. Their third child was born in June 1911—finally a boy—and they named him Ernest but took to calling him Monroe.

In the spring of 1913, P.C. bought an eighty-acre farm on Big Creek from his uncle, Bill Gatewood, for $1,000. Emma went to work hauling rocks and suckering tobacco, picking apples and pulling hay and coaxing the cows down off the hill—all while taking care of their growing family. She was a practical woman, a Roosevelt Republican, and knew how to do things for herself. She had a set of books from 1908 full of home remedies and concoctions that would take paint off the door or cure dandruff or kill ants. She had ripped out the page that explained how to ferment grapes to make wine. When she wasn't working or cooking for P.C. or cleaning the house or taking care of the kids, she'd park herself somewhere out of the way and get lost in a book. She read encyclopedias, but she was particularly fond of classic Greek poetry, quest stories like _The Odyssey_ and _The Iliad,_ and she read them cover to cover when she could find the time. Their fourth child, William Anderson, was born in January 1914. The following year, the two eldest girls, Helen and Ruth, started school at Sardis, a one-room schoolhouse on the hill near Crown City, by State Route 553.

Then came Rowena, their fifth child, in 1916, and three months later Emma was pregnant again. A few weeks before she was due to give birth, P.C. assaulted her. He didn't drink or smoke, but he could lose his temper without aid, and he punched her in the face and head so many times that for two weeks she could barely rest it on a pillow. They named the baby Esther Ann. In December 1918, they bought the Brown farm for $30,000, the place their children would come to think of as home. The farm included a field of fertile bottomland that ran flat as a tabletop from their hillside house to the Ohio River, about a quarter mile away. From the front porch, Emma could see the green hills of West Virginia across the river. The house had four bedrooms upstairs and one down, three covered porches and a basement. An old, defunct piano sat in the parlor, with a horsehair sofa that pulled out into a bed. A Victrola sat on a small table, near the bookshelf. The living room had a heating stove and the kitchen held a cooking stove and a sink with a hand pump that drew water from a cistern. One porch had a swing, and the children's rooms had chamber pots they'd use in the winter. There was a plot large enough for a three-acre garden out front, and Emma woke early each day to tend to it by kerosene lamp. She grew rhubarb, cucumbers, beans, and a healthy patch of morning glories.

They had only $5,000 to put down from the sale of their other farm, which meant there was work to be done between there and comfortable. Emma threw herself into it, and saved until it hurt. The children all worked hard, too. By two years old, they were sweeping floors and gathering eggs. By three they were collecting kindling for the potbellied stove. By four they were washing and drying dishes. By five they knew how to wash their own clothes. Each morning, P.C. would rise at five and dress and walk to the bottom of the stairs, where he'd pound on the newel post while calling out their names. The kids would jump to their feet from where they slept, four to a bed. The girls swept the house and did the dishes and sometimes helped prepare the meals. After breakfast, they'd all head out into the fields to hoe or pull weeds or pick vegetables or deworm the tobacco plants. The younger children were charged with filling a bucket with lime and walking among the muskmelons and watermelons, sprinkling the mixture on the vines as they went.

To prepare the fields, P.C. hitched a drag to a team of horses to break the earth, and the kids would sometimes climb onto the flat wooden contraption and drag their bare feet in the loamy soil. Emma went to the fields each day and worked alongside the farmhands, as did all the kids. When the work was done, the children would tear off across the bottoms toward the Ohio River, between their home and the mountains. A few of them could swim to the other side, but most stayed in the shallows, laughing and splashing off the day's dirt. They'd sing "Old Black Joe" and climb inside an old tire and spank each other down the hillside. At harvest time, they'd pick muskmelons, watermelons, tomatoes, cucumbers, and corn. P.C. took most of it to the Saturday market down in Huntington. The rest they ate or canned or sold at a little vegetable stand by the highway. Muskmelons or a dozen ears of sweet corn for ten cents. Cucumbers for a penny each. Emma canned hundreds of gallons of fruits and vegetables for the summer and winter, and the shelves in the cold underground cellar were lined with scores of half-gallon jars.

They ate everything that came from the earth and wasn't poisonous, from blackberries to persimmons to wild raspberries. They learned that birds and animals don't go hungry, so why should people? So many trees and bushes provided food—hickory nut, beechnut, walnut, honey locust pod, maple syrup, crabapple, mulberry, plum, cherry, huckleberry. Edible plants included dandelions, narrow dock, wild lettuce, white top, clovers, violets, meadow lettuce, poke leaves, and milkweed. And nothing went to waste. Once in a while the men would kill a fattened hog, and they'd build a fire under a fifty-five-gallon drum full of well water. Late in the day they'd string the hog from a tree and gut it. When the water was hot enough they'd lower the heavy carcass into the drum, then crank it back up and run their sharpened knives over the flesh to remove the coarse hair from the hide. They'd portion the hog and Emma would take the hams, prepare them and smoke them in the smokehouse. She'd take all the meat from the head and cover it in brine in a ceramic crock, sometimes adding a little vinegar, and make hog's head cheese. She'd stuff green peppers with shredded cabbage and dunk them into the brine. It wasn't rare for the kids to eat so much that they became sick.

When she cured the bacon, she'd remove the rind and cut it into small strips and cook it in a heavy pot to render the lard and preserve the skin, which she called cracklings. The children ached for the hog slaughter because it meant their school lunches would include biscuits and homemade jam and fried pork loin. Emma made apple butter in a giant cauldron over a large fire outside. She put the girls in charge of stirring the fresh, peeled apples constantly with a long wooden paddle and they occasionally got too close and felt the sting of popping hot apple butter on their skin. She made chicken and dumplings and chicken and noodles and every once in a while, on special occasions, fried chicken. Once every summer a man drove around to the farms with a truck full of various cuts of beef. Emma would peek inside and ask the man about prices. She could never afford much, but sometimes she'd walk away with a chuck roast and she'd make a giant pot of stew. Beef was rare, though—so rare that one of the boys walked into the barn once and bit a cow on the ear to see if it tasted like beef.

She served breakfast at a long table, and P.C. always sat at the head. Sometimes, if the farmhands joined them, there'd be seventeen mouths waiting to be fed. She'd come from the kitchen with large pans of biscuits, bowls of oatmeal and cornmeal mush, and bacon. She served pancakes but refused to flavor her syrup. When the children needed to relieve themselves, they used the outhouse, which they called "the closet" or "bath with a path." It was a three-seater, and they wiped their behinds with pages torn from the Sears, Roebuck catalog to save money on toilet paper. They walked to school, barefoot sometimes, because they each got just two pairs of twenty-five-cent shoes a year, and they had to make them last. At Christmas, P.C. would chop down a tree and drag it home. The older children would string popcorn and make ornaments from last year's wrapping paper or the tinfoil from chewing gum or cigarette packages that they found along the road. Their stockings were filled with an orange, a banana, a candy cane, English walnuts, and a new pencil or handkerchief. Most of the larger gifts they shared, including a sled one year and a single pair of roller skates another. Emma sometimes made the girls little dolls with ceramic heads and sawdust stuffing.

P.C. was a thinker, a renaissance man, and his neighbors thought highly of him, even if he overpaid his farmhands. He'd taught school for fifteen years—at the one-room Oak Dale and Waugh Bottom schools—before he quit to run a farm and grow a family, which expanded again in 1920, with the birth of twins, Robert Wilson and Elizabeth Caldwell. He drew blueprints and built a beautiful modern home for his parents on a hillside not far away. He also designed and constructed a new schoolhouse at Swan Creek. The neighbors knew of his above-average intellect. He'd bought a large tobacco barn for one hundred dollars from a man who lived a mile away and had numbered every board, into the thousands, then disassembled the barn and hauled it down the road and up the hill and to a level patch behind their house where he rebuilt it, nail by nail and board by board. When he finished the project, he climbed to the peak of the aluminum roof and did a handstand while the farmhands cheered at his thin silhouette.

On Sundays, he required the children attend church. They'd pack into a pew at the Methodist church near Swan Creek, where they'd sweat and swat flies for hours while the preacher tried to save their souls from eternal damnation. P.C. made a point of delivering a short sermon to the congregation, himself, when the preacher had finished. Always, though, just beyond the thin shroud of his respectable public persona, there gurgled a mean streak, and if something set him off, he'd grow wild-eyed and his veins would bulge. His children once watched him beat a stubborn horse half to death with a leather strop. He was prone to administer discipline on his own blood with a briar switch or fire poker or whatever instrument was close at hand. His madness, in the right moment, wasn't even bound by law. In 1924, a year after Emma delivered their ninth child, P.C. killed a man. P. C. Gatewood and Hiram Johnson got into an argument one afternoon. The state would charge P.C. with manslaughter and the trial would drag on. Young Monroe, twelve at the time, would testify that Hiram Johnson had fetched his rifle and Monroe had fetched his daddy's for him, and just as Hiram had raised his gun, P.C. had swung his and caught Johnson on the forehead, the approximate site of a fresh wound from an earlier scrap the old man had found himself in. He never regained consciousness and four days later, in the hospital, Hiram died.

Word was that Johnson's widow would not sue P.C. because he'd paid the medical bills and funeral expenses. But a lawyer from Huntington, West Virginia, convinced her to try for a settlement and she won. P.C. was convicted of manslaughter and ordered to pay $50,000. His prison sentence was suspended because he had nine children and a farm to tend to, but the debt was so burdensome that he had to sell half the land. Even then he couldn't make ends meet, and each year it got worse. By the time Dora Louise was born in 1926, and Lucy Eleanor in 1928, P.C. was struggling to keep his farm running. In August 1929, he got a job with the Ohio Township rural school board, hauling pupils from Sugar Creek to Crown City and back for seventy-five dollars a month. He converted an old pickup truck into a makeshift school bus to make the runs. The board hired him again the following year, but in 1932 the contract went to Stanley Swain, who offered to do it for seven dollars less. The extra income was missed as the Gatewoods inched through the worst of the Great Depression and tried to cope with a drought that had started in the east and raked across the country toward the Great Plains. Crop prices had fallen drastically. That same year, nearly 40 percent of the labor force was out of work. By the following year, more than 40 percent of Ohio factory workers and 67 percent of Ohio construction workers were unemployed, and many of them, with nowhere to turn, were moving from cities like Akron and Toledo and Columbus to the countryside to try to feed their children off the land.

It wasn't unusual for tramps to stop at the house on the hill and ask for food. They all had the same look of desperation. Though she eschewed government handouts, Emma was always generous and invited them to sit on the porch and enjoy a hearty meal. She'd do anything for someone who needed help, and often nursed sick friends back to health. P.C. occasionally let the tramps sleep in his barn if they promised not to smoke. The children sometimes followed the travelers down the highway, and they'd grow old remembering one particular family. The man was driving a dog team, which was pulling a small cart loaded with their possessions. The woman was pregnant, clutching a young child, her feet hanging down off the back. In 1932, as progressive New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt chased vulnerable President Herbert Hoover, P.C., a longtime Republican, switched parties. Emma would have none of it. When the election rolled around, P.C. was in his sickbed, eaten up with ulcers. Pollsters were dispatched to his home to record his vote, but Emma wouldn't let them inside. This event added yet another layer to their discord.

P. C. Gatewood, with the help of his wife and children, held on, but they wouldn't hold the farm through the decade. And he was becoming increasingly difficult to live with. Emma trudged on, as May wound down, through lonely woods. She sucked on bouillon cubes as she hiked, and found water where she could. She filled up on wild strawberries—whenever she found a patch, she'd drop her sack and stuff it with as many as she could carry. After a hard climb up Shuckstack Mountain, she discovered a dented trash can lid that had collected a small puddle of rainwater. It was just enough to wet her throat. She cleaned the lid to collect more from the looming rainstorm. There was just enough room on the precipice for a small fire tower, and she made her bed on the porch, propping up several planks to shield her from the strong wind. The next afternoon, she ran into a man and woman, the first couple she'd seen on the trail. She was out of food, and after she explained what she was doing, the day hikers felt sorry for her and divided their supplies. She made it to Spence Camp in a downpour, a rain so hard she couldn't light a fire. It was only 4:00 PM, but she hung up her wet clothes and climbed into the lean-to and tried to sleep, wet as she was.

She wasn't down long when a man appeared out of the woods. He introduced himself as Lionel Edna and said he had been painting trail blazes, white, two inches by six inches long, on trees along the path. He fixed himself supper as they chatted, then climbed into his sleeping bag on the opposite side of the shelter. They talked a while before drifting off. She left early the next morning and the wind had picked up, giant gusts that nearly blew her down. The weather was odd, she thought, for May in the South. The rain started at 11:00 and she decided to call it a day when she reached a shelter around 2:00 PM. She found some dry wood and built a fire and washed and dried her clothes. The following afternoon, she trudged into Newfound Gap, near the center of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and into the strangest scene she'd seen so far. There were people everywhere at the popular park, including about a dozen nuns who were slapping each other on the back and acting like teenagers. She watched one of them climb onto a wall and shout and jump off, as the rest of them laughed. They were giddy, having fun and playing around a stone monument built to honor the Rockefellers.

Emma noticed a bus stop nearby. Her shoes were about ruined, and hiking through all this rain without a raincoat was miserable, so she reckoned she could use a few supplies. Gatlinburg, Tennessee, wasn't far, so she decided she'd catch the bus. Just then, one of the nuns approached and asked if she could take a picture of Emma. She bought shoes and a raincoat and got a bite to eat in Gatlinburg, then tried to hitchhike back to the trail, but nobody would stop. She checked into a motel instead. She caught the bus the next morning and got back on the trail by 8:00 AM, hiking quickly to break in her new sneakers. A heavy fog settled over the Smoky Mountains that evening and a chill set in, so Emma heated smooth stones in the fire and slept atop them to keep her back warm. She made it to the edge of the Smoky Mountain National Park, near the line separating North Carolina and Tennessee, the following day, and she fell in love with the fields of rhododendron and laurel that seemed to be growing everywhere she looked. She lost the trail once and asked some boys to point her in the right direction. When she found the trail in the rain, it had been plowed up. The muck from the tilled field clung to her shoes and the walk through the field was staggering. On the other side, as she walked down an abandoned buggy road, she found herself in a tunnel through the tall rhododendron. It was dark and eerie and, as the rain fell into the tunnel, quite beautiful.

She made it into Hot Springs, North Carolina, on May 28, after an arduous uphill climb. The little town on the French Broad River whispered of the past. In 1914, during World War I, the owner of a resort called the Mountain Park Hotel had struck a deal with the War Department to house prisoners of war there. By train came 2,200 Germans, four times the population of the town. They were mostly passengers, officers, and crew members from the world's largest ship, the _Vaterland,_ which had taken cover in an American port when Great Britain had declared war on Germany. They were no ordinary prisoners of war. The men wore suits and ties and the women were fantastic dressmakers. They set about building a village on the hotel lawn using driftwood and scrap lumber. They built a chapel from flattened Prince Albert Tobacco tins. The townspeople developed friendships with the enemy aliens, and each Sunday afternoon they sat together for a concert from the prisoner orchestra. After the war, the prisoners from what had been the largest internment camp in the United States were transported to Fort Oglethorpe, in Georgia, where Emma had started her journey. But many of them had found their nineteen months of captivity so enjoyable that they returned with their families and settled in Hot Springs.

Emma sensed that brotherly love. The folks in the area were awfully nice, and just about everybody she bumped into insisted on feeding her and giving her something to drink. One woman gave her a glass of buttermilk and a piece of cake, her first on the trail, and she enjoyed it. She heard the locusts sawing for the first time all year. On May 29, she came upon a small store and intended to buy some food for the desolate walk ahead. All the store had was a can of black beans and a box of raw prunes. She bought them anyway, and chewed the dry, hard prunes all afternoon until they were gone. The sun was hot as she made her way up Turkey Bald Mountain. The climb was slow and Emma was lost in her thoughts when she heard something strange. It sounded like some kind of bird at first, a low sort of hiss, and she kept walking, unafraid, until she felt something strike the leg of her dungarees. She glanced down and there beside the trail was a rattlesnake, coiled and ready to strike again. She slammed the tip of her walking stick toward the snake and jumped sideways. She darted by, her adrenaline surging, her ribs rising with each short, sharp breath. The snake stayed coiled and Emma was soon yards past it, thankful, reminded of the danger of a single misstep.

4 WILD DOGS JUNE 1–8, 1955 She'd been gone nearly a month. Emma's children hadn't heard from her, had no idea where she was or what she was doing, but not one of them was worried. Their mama was raw-boned and sturdy, and despite her absence, they knew she'd be all right, whatever her ambitions. It wasn't rare for her to be gone for long stretches, so if they gave her disappearance a passing thought, it did not dwell in their memories. She zigzagged between North Carolina and Tennessee, thirsty, sore, tired, over roads of cut stone and up mountainsides steep and tall, sleeping outdoors more often than in, giving herself to the wilderness, planting a crop of memories, exploring the world and her own mind, writing in her little notebook of the challenges and rewards, the wild dogs that came in the night, the cozy fire that made a campsite more cheerful, the magic of campers who shared their sausage sandwiches across picnic tables. "My feet are sore," she would write. "I did not find any water," she would write.

"I kept a fire for company as well as protection," she would write. "When I could not locate the trail after an hour, I was so near out of food," she would write. Occasionally, when she'd slip off the path, the woman who wouldn't let a passing tramp go hungry back home in Ohio now gladly accepted invitations to rest or eat from the members of the long, linear neighborhood that was slowly, hiker by hiker, getting acquainted with the new Appalachian Trail. The trail itself was the product of a dreamer, a man named Benton MacKaye. He said he had been inspired during a six-week hiking trip after graduating from Harvard, when he stood on Vermont's Stratton Mountain and imagined a ridge-top trail running through wilderness across the entire distance of the range. In 1921, when the idea had fermented, some friends convinced him to describe his vision in an article for the _Journal of the American Institute of Architects._ MacKaye wrote that the purpose of the trail would be to "extend the primeval environment and to set bounds to the metropolitan environment," providing a grand natural backbone accessible by those packed into cities along the Eastern Seaboard. After the article was published, MacKaye led a concerted effort to involve hiking clubs, lawyers, and others who might help bring his plan to fruition. Hundreds contributed, blazing and mapping sections, searching through property and tax records in county courthouses, angling to cobble together and preserve for the public the longest continuous walking path in the world.

Ten years later, nearly half the trail had been marked—but mostly in the Northeast, where many trails had long been established and hiking communities had a history. Myron Avery, a young lawyer and early visionary who took the reins, helped organize hiking clubs and plan undeveloped sections. Avery became chairman of the fledgling Appalachian Trail Conference in 1931, and by the group's meeting in 1937 in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the trail was nearly finished. Avery knew even then, though, that the A.T. would "never be completed." It would shift and bend and be subjected to endless rerouting and relocation, as if it had a life of its own. The timing of the completion was perfect, and it's quite possible the trail might not have existed if the plan had been delayed. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States had just one hundred miles of paved highways. But by the 1930s, cities had begun to spill outward, like a spreading blot, and roads that had been designed for horses and buggies were quickly becoming obsolete. Maybe those early A.T. volunteers felt the need for expediency as their country transformed quickly, as the population grew, as the American automobile industry sped forward at an unprecedented rate.

The very same year of the trail conservancy meeting in Gatlinburg, in fact, the federal Public Works Administration signed a check for more than $29 million and the federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation bought nearly $41 million in revenue bonds, and 10,000 men began working day and night to move 26 million tons of earth and stone and pour 4.3 million square yards of reinforced concrete to create two steady, even, parallel lanes that ran the length of Pennsylvania—including more than 114 new bridges, with acceleration lanes and paved shoulders—bisecting the state east to west. _Popular Mechanics_ would call the Penn Turnpike "America's first highway on which full performance of today's automobiles can be realized." The big road was born. It's ironic, perhaps, but the new expressway's conceptual father was the same man who thought up the Appalachian Trail: Benton MacKaye. A few years after his article on the "primeval environment" that stretched from north to south, MacKaye, in an article in the _New Republic,_ envisioned a "highway completely free of horses, carriages, pedestrians, town, grade crossings; a highway built for the motorist and kept free from every encroachment, except the filling stations and restaurants necessary for his convenience."

Two years later, as the small army of trail blazers and pioneers worked to connect and maintain a footpath through a streak of American wilderness, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was already planning ways to absorb millions of soldiers, soon to engage fully in World War II, back into the nation's economy once the last bullet had been fired. And he saw a national system of highways that connected the country's major cities and spliced together rural agriculture centers as a possible solution. Planners immediately started charting a proposal to build or expand nearly forty thousand miles of road. By 1939, when Ford Motor Co.'s "The Road of Tomorrow" and General Motors' "Highways and Horizons" exhibits opened at the New York World's Fair, the American public was salivating over high-speed roadways. "Since the beginning of civilization, transportation has been the key to man's progress—his prosperity—his happiness," said a narrator at the GM exhibit, which was said to feature the new and improved American city of 1960, with tangles of expressways lined with sleek cars and trucks. "With the fast, safely designed highways of 1960... thrilling scenic feasts of great and beautiful country may now be explored."

When Dwight D. Eisenhower took office in 1953, one of his first items of business was to see about building better highways. "Our cities still conform too rigidly to the patterns, customs, and practices of fifty years ago," he wrote. "Each year we add hundreds of thousands of new automobiles to our vehicular population, but our road systems do not keep pace with the need." Eisenhower thought the American road system was decent but had been designed based on "terrain, existing Indian trails, cattle trails, and arbitrary section lines," and that it "has never been completely overhauled or planned to satisfy the needs of ten years ahead." On Eisenhower's behalf, at a meeting in the Adirondacks of the governors of the forty-eight states, Vice President Richard Nixon despaired over the nearly 40,000 people killed and 1.3 million injured on roads annually, the "billions of hours lost" to traffic jams and detours, and the traffic-related civil suits clogging courts. Then he shocked the room. He called for a $50 billion federal highway program spread over ten years.

On October 23 of the same year, in Emma Gatewood's home state of Ohio, the first concrete was poured for a new $336 million cross-state turnpike. The state had acquired fifty-six hundred parcels of land it needed for right-of-way and went to work building a highway divided by a fifty-six-foot depressed median. It would feature paved shoulders, fifteen well-lit traffic interchanges, sixteen service plazas, tollbooths, and an ambulance service. "You really will be able to see where you're going as the minimum sight distance is 900 feet," gushed the _Columbus Dispatch._ "There are no steep hills, because the maximum upgrade is 2 percent and the maximum downgrade 3.2 percent. You won't have to slow down from maximum speed limits—65 miles an hour for cars and 55 for trucks—when you drive around curves, they're that gentle." Two years later, the ribbons of road stretched from Pennsylvania in the east to Indiana in the west, over rivers and streams, across swampland and rolling hills. Joined with the Penn Turnpike, the road totaled 611 miles from Philadelphia to Indianapolis. So exciting was the new highway that the people of Ohio began to gather on overpasses to watch the speeding cars wend their way along the smooth pavement.

The future of America had arrived, and it was riding on a 322-cubic-inch V-8 with an automatic transmission. By 1955, Americans owned sixty-two million vehicles. By June, when Emma Gatewood was a month into her hike, the auto industry was on pace for a banner year behind presidents such as Tex Colbert and Henry Ford II. Chevrolet had set a six-month record, registering 756,317 new cars. The national magazines were filled with color pictures of the new '56 models, the Studebaker, the Chrysler, the Cadillac, the Buick Dynaflow, with the sweep-ahead styling and the sizzle to match, which "gets going from a standing start like a lark leaving the nest, with not a hint of hesitation between take-hold and take-off." Every car off the line in Detroit was bigger than the last. Fins grew, and engines added horses. The number of two-car families was expected to jump by three million within five years, to a total of 7.5 million, which was attributed to the trend of suburban living. Some sixteen million "one-car wives" remained marooned in the suburbs, but that would soon change. Advertisements for Old Crow bourbon and the Stetson Playboy were surrounded by those for Quaker State Motor Oil and B. F. Goodrich tires.

The rise of the car in the 1950s was accompanied by the rise of television. At the beginning of the decade, only 9 percent of American households had a TV set. More than half had one by 1954, and 86 percent would own one by the end of the decade. Americans began to experience life not by the soles of their feet, but by the seat of their pants. And along came a startling discovery. In March 1955, two months before Emma set out, a convention of family doctors assembled in Los Angeles to talk about a new generation of surprisingly lethargic children. Two emissaries from the athletic world broke the news: American young people are forgetting how to walk. So said University of California football coach Lynn "Pappy" Waldorf and US Olympic trainer Eddie Wojecki in the keynote address to the seventh annual assembly of the American Academy of General Practice. Children, the men testified, would rather jump into a car to go a block than walk. And shockingly, the trend had already produced conspicuous changes in the physiques of kids.

The men both spoke of the sudden need to strengthen rather than loosen the muscles of athletes. They ascribed the change to a severe decrease in walking brought about by the habitual use of cars. And they pointed to a simultaneous decline in hiking. America, it seemed, was at a turning point. When given a choice, Americans preferred to grab the car keys. Streets and cities were being designed for the automobile, rather than the pedestrian. This should have come as no surprise. Henry David Thoreau predicted as much ninety-three years before Emma's journey, in June 1862, when _Atlantic Monthly_ published one of Thoreau's essays, called "Walking." At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only, when fences shall be multiplied, and mantraps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God's earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman's grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days are upon us.

Anthropologists estimate that early man walked twenty miles a day. Mental and physical benefits have been attributed to walking as far back as ancient times. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) described walking as one of the "Medicines of the Will." Hippocrates, the Greek physician, called walking "man's best medicine" and prescribed walks to treat emotional problems, hallucinations, and digestive disorders. Aristotle lectured while strolling. Through the centuries, the best thinkers, writers, and poets have preached the virtues of walking. Leonardo da Vinci designed elevated streets to protect walkers from cart traffic. Johann Sebastian Bach once walked two hundred miles to hear a master play the organ. William Wordsworth was said to have walked 180,000 miles in his lifetime. Charles Dickens captured the ecstasy of near-madness and insomnia in the essay "Night Walks" and once said, "The sum of the whole is this: Walk and be happy; Walk and be healthy." Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of "the great fellowship of the Open Road" and the "brief but priceless meetings which only trampers know." Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche said, "Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value."

More recently, writers who knew the benefits of striking out excoriated the apathetic public, over and over again, for its laziness. "Of course, people still walk," wrote a journalist in _Saturday Night_ magazine in 1912. "That is, they shuffle along on their own pins from the door to the street car or taxi-cab.... But real walking... is as extinct as the dodo." "They say they haven't time to walk—and wait fifteen minutes for a bus to carry them an eighth of a mile," wrote Edmund Lester Pearson in 1925. "They pretend that they are rushed, very busy, very energetic; the fact is, they are lazy. A few quaint persons—boys chiefly—ride bicycles." "But to dyed-in-the-wool walk-lovers the car has proved a calamity... because unless we be strong as steel, our lazy and baser natures yield to the temptation of time-saving when a ride is offered us," wrote Mary Magennis in 1931. Thoreau's "evil days" had arrived, and the country, keys in hand, was making a dramatic move from feet to tires. The resulting death toll was astounding. By 1934, as the road-building programs gained steam, it was expected that two thousand pedestrians would be killed and eight thousand more injured. Fifteen years later, those numbers had skyrocketed. Cars were killing nearly thirty people a day and injuring seven hundred. A journalist for the _Saturday Evening Post_ called it "a feud" between man and automobile. The pedestrian, he wrote, "literally would be safer on a lion-infested African veldt or in man-eating tiger territory than he is crossing a downtown street at dusk."

And at that moment, among the confluence of mechanical engineering and highway building, the Appalachian Trail—the People's Path—was fully blazed and opened to the public. You could set out for a day or a week or a month and lose yourself in the wilderness. A man named Harold Allen summarized its appeal: Remote for detachment, narrow for chosen company, winding for leisure, lonely for contemplation, the Trail leads not merely north and south but upward to the body, mind and soul of man. In 1948, Earl V. Shaffer became the first person to hike its entirety in a single trip, the first thru-hiker, and when he was finished, he wrote: "Already it seemed like a vivid dream, through sunshine, shadow, and rain—Already I knew that many times I would want to be back again—On the cloud-high hills where the whole world lies below and far away—By the wind-worn cairn where admiring eyes first welcome newborn day—To walk once more where the white clouds sail, far from the city clutter—And drink a toast to the Long High Trail in clear, cold mountain water."

She came down out of Carver's Gap, near Tennessee's Roan Mountain, on June 4, and she was having no luck finding a place to stay. It seemed the bigger the house, the less likely she would be welcome. One woman was terribly snooty and acted as though she was insulted that Emma had even come to her door. Tired of searching for charity, she checked into a motel on the highway. She washed her hair and some clothes, took a welcome shower, and got a good night's sleep on a soft bed. The next day's hike was nearly all on paved road and she grew tired quickly. When she could go no farther, she stopped at a little house to ask if she could rest a while on the porch. The man who answered thought she was a government agent who had come to spy on them. He stayed inside with the door latched and asked her all sorts of crazy questions through the screen. She tried to explain who she was and what she was doing, but the man was still suspicious. He asked her if she was with the FBI. When she realized she was making no progress, she stepped off the porch and walked on and finally found a family with seven sons, all at home, who let her stay the night.

She left at a quarter to six the next morning and followed the trail up an Appalachian gorge carved out by the swift waters of Laurel Fork. At the end of the gorge, past eastern hemlocks and sycamore trees, she found a majestic waterfall, the most beautiful she'd ever seen, cascading over moss-covered stone. She pressed on toward Hampton, Tennessee, but she'd run out of water by the time she reached Watauga Dam, the second tallest of all the Tennessee Valley Authority dams. She asked a man there, standing in front of the sixty-four-hundred-acre lake, for drinking water, but he said there was none around. Emma didn't seem to mind, though. "A very nice looking man he was, too," she wrote in her notebook when she stopped to drink from a spring. She slept that night atop the mountain, and the wild dogs came back, so she built a fire for protection. She stayed awake most of the night, worrying about whether it would rain. On June 8, a storm moved over the mountains and brought with it rain and sleet and intense cold. Emma put on most of the clothes she had, including three coats, and walked as quickly as she could, but she couldn't get warm. The trail was lousy with nettles and brush and the hike was miserable, but she finally crossed the state line, into Virginia, and into the little town of Damascus. It was a place that would become known as Trail Town, USA, in part due to its kindness to A.T. hikers, but on that day, when she needed shelter most, she was turned away from a motel. Soaked as she was, they wouldn't keep her. She walked three more blocks and found a cabin for rent, and it was fine. She had privacy, anyway, and she wouldn't be a bother to anyone. She washed some of her clothes and that night, celebrating the fact that she crossed another state line, her third so far, she sat down and treated herself to a delicious supper of steak.

5 HOW'D YOU GET IN HERE? JUNE 9–22, 1955 She couldn't keep a secret forever. She had hiked through Jefferson National Forest, then through a long stretch where the trail was torn up from manganese mining, then, nearing Groseclose, Virginia, she found a section flush with peach trees and apple trees and ate her fill, sweet juice on her lips. She had been turned away again at a snooty motel, and had seen a large black-and-yellow butterfly near Goldbond, Virginia, and had found a big white goose feather at the very top of Sinking Creek Mountain. She had stayed the night with Mr. and Mrs. Ed Pugh, and Mr. and Mrs. Hash Burton, and Mr. Lou Oliver, and Mr. and Mrs. Taylor of Pine Ridge, and Dr. and Mrs. Harry Semones, who enjoyed her stories about the trail so much that they kept her up past bedtime. So it was that on the afternoon of June 20, a Sunday, Emma met a man at a gas station and let slip what she was doing, where she was going. The next day, as she approached Black Horse Gap, she sat down a few yards away from the road, on the edge of the forest, to eat a snack. A car stopped in front of her and the driver pulled onto the shoulder. Two men climbed out, well dressed, and walked toward her. The first introduced himself as Preston Leech, a photographer from Roanoke, Virginia, and the second said he was Frank E. Callahan. They were both trail club members who had heard about her journey and spent the afternoon trying to track her down. They were overjoyed to finally find her.

They told her they wanted to tell her story, that what she was doing was simply amazing. The exposure would be great for the trail, and people around there would love it. She wasn't sure. She still hadn't sent word home to her family. Besides, someone might read about her and get the idea to harm her, or take advantage of an old lady. She told them no, that she wouldn't cooperate, but they didn't let up. They convinced her to stay the night at Callahan's cabin near the trail. They took her pack and loaded it into the car, as insurance, and she set off to hike the final ten miles over the mountains to Bear Wallow Gap, where they picked her up and drove her to the cabin. The game warden, J. W. Luck, joined them for dinner, which Callahan spooned from tin cans onto plates. It was 10:00 PM on the forty-eighth day of her journey when she finally gave in. Leech fetched his camera. Emma sat up straight, tucked her right hand into her left, and smiled through false teeth. That night, she jotted in her diary. "I finally was found by the newspaper," she wrote.

The next morning, a headline ran in the _Roanoke Times._ OHIO WOMAN, 67, HIKING 2,050 MILES ON APPY TRAIL The prospect of a 2,050-mile hike over mountain trails would cause many a hardy soul to cringe. A 67-year-old great-grandmother from Gallipolis, Ohio, enjoys it. Mrs. Emma Gatewood, who was in Botetourt County yesterday, is hiking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. She did 20 miles from Cloverdale to Bear Wallow Gap yesterday—in tennis shoes. Frank Callahan and Preston Leech of the local Appalachian Trail Club met the energetic lady at Black Horse Gap yesterday afternoon after Blue Ridge Parkway rangers had reported her whereabouts. The widowed mother of 11 children, Mrs. Gatewood spent the winter in California where she decided to travel the 2,050-mile trail, which follows mountain ranges up the eastern seaboard. She flew to Atlanta, Ga., and set foot on the trail at Mt. Oglethorpe, Ga., May 3. End of the trek will be the northern terminus at Mt. Katahdin, Me. Modestly reluctant to discuss her plans, Mrs. Gatewood travels light, said Callahan and Leech. All her belongings are carried in a sack. She refuses all transportation offers along the trail but she will accept rides to nearby towns if she is taken back to the trail where she left it.

The Ohio housewife has 26 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Today she plans to move from the Peaks of Otter area north to the James River. "Uphill walking is easier than going down," she declared. The news was out. She didn't know it then, but the story—her story—would soon sweep the nation. She'd be mentioned in newspaper columns from Los Angeles to New York. Television shows would clamor for her time. As word spread like wood smoke, most towns she walked through, and even those she didn't, would send a reporter to intercept her and ask her questions about how she'd done it, how she was feeling, why she had begun. They'd call her Grandma Gatewood, and her name would be heard on the street corners and in the halls of the United States Congress. That morning, though, it was one measly article in one local newspaper. Still, she figured it was time to finally let her family know what she was doing. She picked up a few postcards from the nearest store and dropped them in the mail. When she first left, she had told her children she was going on a walk. Now they'd know what she meant.

The trail was designed to have no end, a wild place on which to be comfortably lost for as long as one desired. In those early days, nobody fathomed walking the thing from beginning to end in one go. Section hikes, yes. Day hikes, too. But losing yourself for five months, measuring your body against the earth, fingering the edge of mental and physical endurance, wasn't the point. The trail was to be considered in sections, like a cow is divided into cuts of beef. Even if you sample every slice, to eat the entire beast in a single sitting was not the point. Before 1948, it wasn't even considered possible. How long would it take? What equipment would one need? What maps? Where and when should one start? These were the unknowns, but the human spirit has a way of answering questions. The first came in the form of a man trying to shake his demons. Earl Shaffer came home from World War II "confused and depressed," he wrote. He had lost a close friend in the war, someone with whom he had shared a desire to hike the A.T. Like Emma Gatewood, he began considering the hike again after an article in a magazine, _Outdoor Life,_ sparked his interest. The strong hiker found a plethora of obstacles: overgrowth, downed trees blocking the path, rough stretches where the trail wasn't marked. Eleven years after its completion, whole sections of the trail seemed abandoned, forgotten.

He sent a postcard to a meeting of the Appalachian Trail Conference from Holmes, New York. The flowers bloom, the songbirds sing And though it sun or rain I walk the mountain tops with Spring From Georgia north to Maine. The postcard was the first the A.T.C. volunteers had ever heard from Shaffer, and when he finished at Mount Katahdin, some doubted the claim until he showed slides, his journal, and talked about the trail in detail. The _Appalachian Trailway News_ ran a small blurb headlined "Continuous Trip over Trail" on the back page, but his hike brought much attention. He was interviewed by the newspaper and got the attention of _National Geographic,_ which sent a reporter to hike the trail. The path was in close proximity to half a dozen of the country's biggest cities and nearly half the population of the United States, but before Shaffer, few even knew it existed. The attention helped. It took three years for someone to repeat Shaffer's achievement. A bearded, twenty-four-year-old Eagle Scout named Gene Espy came through in 1951, but he didn't know he was only the second person to thru-hike until he was shown a newspaper clipping that confirmed it. He assumed many had done it before. Chester Dziengielewski and Martin Papendick became the first to hike the north-to-south route, from Maine to Georgia. In 1952, George Miller became the fifth thru-hiker, at age seventy-two. The first woman to hike the full trail in sections was Mary Kilpatrick, who finished the last part in 1939.

Then there was an enigma. In 1952, hikers along the A.T. reported meeting a couple called Dick Lamb and Mildred. Many assumed the two were married and took to referring to Mildred as Mildred Lamb. In fact, she was Mildred Lisette Norman, an American pacifist, vegetarian, and peace activist who had set out with a friend, Dick, to take the long journey. She eschewed folding money and carried very few supplies, and would later become known as Peace Pilgrim, speaking at churches and universities through the American conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. She and Dick hiked north to the Susquehanna River, then took a bus to Maine and hiked from Mount Katahdin south. No hiker received all that much attention, though, because independent reports on their progress were either nonexistent or sporadic. Many of them would later write books and communicate regularly with others who planned to thru-hike. But there wasn't exactly an organized system for accountability in those days. The ATC, which was the only outfit interested in paying close attention to trail accomplishments, tended to take people at their word. And that required relying on hikers to both report their trips, and report them accurately.

Besides that, Americans weren't all that interested. Or maybe they were distracted. World War II was over. The Korean War came to a close in 1953. But as soon as soldiers returned, the United States found itself locked in the Cold War, racing Soviet Russia toward the H-bomb. The news of H-bomb developments deeply impacted Americans, who found themselves discussing nuclear fallout and megatons and the genetic consequences of radioactivity at the dinner table. On March 1, 1954, the United States launched its latest H-bomb on the atoll of Bikini, in the Pacific. The navy had marked off thirty thousand square miles as a danger zone that no ship was allowed to enter. One made it through, however. A crew of Japanese fishermen aboard a boat called the _Lucky Dragon_ were pulling in their nets when the bomb exploded. One of the men gave a captivating, awful account. "We saw strange sparkles and flashes of fire as bright as the sun itself," the fisherman told the press. "The sky glowed fiery red and yellow. The glow went on for several minutes... and then the yellow seemed to fade away. It left a dull red, like a piece of iron cooling in the air. The blast came five minutes later, the sound of many thunders rolled into one. Next we saw a pyramid-shaped cloud rising and the sky began to cloud over most curiously."

A few hours later a fine ash began to fall on the crew of the _Lucky Dragon,_ eighty miles from the test site, who continued pulling in nets until the hold was full. They returned to Japan two weeks later complaining of burns, nausea, and bleeding from the gums. By then the radioactive catch, some 16,500 pounds of tuna, had been sold to markets across the country, causing mass panic and raising hostile anti-American sentiment among the Japanese. In September, the crew's radio operator died, becoming the first Japanese victim of a hydrogen bomb. The unprecedented destructiveness of the brand-new H-bomb was finally on full display, and it horrified the world. If a hydrogen bomb could do that to fishermen eighty miles away, what could it do to Manhattan? Or London? Or Tokyo? Headlines in England cried: CALL OFF THAT BOMB. Winston Churchill foresaw a "peace of mutual terror." Nikita S. Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, said, "We outstripped the capitalist class and created the hydrogen bomb before them. They think they can intimidate us. But nothing can frighten us, because if they know what a bomb means, so do we."

At every turn, the United States, with its new destructive technology, was on the cusp of conflict with worldwide implications. By 1955, the government was ramping up efforts to encourage Americans to prepare for fire from the sky. The Atomic Energy Commission built a million-dollar village, called "Survival City, U.S.A.," in the Nevada desert, and stocked it with the furniture and appliances and mannequins to represent a typical American home. Then, on national television, the village was bombed. The furniture was splintered and the dummies were burned, but the dogs and mice inside deep, concrete bomb shelters were spared, prompting an official with the Federal Civil Defense Administration to say the only shot at American survival was to "dig in or get out." It wasn't just the Communist bombs Americans were afraid of. It was Communists themselves. The world had been divided after World War II, with Russia on one side and the United States on the other. And by 1955, the fear of Communism in America was intense. The newspapers were filled with stories of spy rings that stole state secrets and agents who had infiltrated government bureaus. The president had ordered chiefs of government bureaus to fire employees whose loyalty was in reasonable doubt and congressional committees were set up to determine the extent of Communist influence in the military and private industry. Libraries banned Communist literature. Colleges demanded loyalty oaths from professors. Some 20 million Americans, more than a tenth of the 166 million US citizens, were subjected to federal security investigations.

On Communism's trail was Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, who had charged in 1950 that the US State Department was a nest of Communists and subversives. By 1954, the strong-necked, emotional politician was the most controversial figure in Washington and a new word had made its debut: McCarthyism. To some he was a fearless patriot, to others a dangerous charlatan. To all observers, he was on the edge of astonishing political power—until he was censured by the US Senate. With the country buzzing about Communism, the Supreme Court had set the course for another period of disruption and civil unrest when, in May 1954, it ruled that "Separate education facilities are inherently unequal," ending racial segregation in public schools. The ruling touched off praise and anguish. "Little by little we move toward a more perfect democracy," read an editorial in the _New York Times._ "The Court has blatantly ignored all law and precedent," said Georgia governor Herman Talmadge. "Georgia will not comply."

The ruling had the largest impact on the states along the Appalachian Trail, especially in the South. School segregation was required in seventeen states at the time of the ruling, and six of those (Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia) were home to the A.T. Four others (Alabama, Delaware, Kentucky, and South Carolina) were close to the trail. In White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, not far from the trail, three hundred white students held a strike when about twenty-five black students tried to attend school in September 1954. That evening, hundreds of white adults met and voted to remove from class any black students who came to school the next day. None did, but the revolt began to spread, to Milford, Delaware; and Baltimore, Maryland; and Washington, DC. The other shocking story of the period was the rapid rise in juvenile crime. Headlines in New York screamed about the "Teen-Age Thrill Killers," a band of four boys from respectable Brooklyn homes who killed a man, beat another up and dumped him in the East River, horsewhipped two girls, and set another man on fire.

Across the country, killer kids made news. A twelve-year-old basketball player from Detroit killed another after a game. A seventeen-year-old from Toledo raped and killed a girl. A fourteen-year-old babysitter in Des Moines killed an eight-year-old because he wouldn't stay in bed. The national crime rate for boys and girls under eighteen had jumped 8 percent between 1953 and 1954. The spree was cause for great concern, and adults found social forces to blame, even two years before anyone had heard of a boy named Elvis Presley: broken homes, television crime programs, comic books, tensions over the threat of war. One other motivator was blamed: inadequate recreation. She left Sunset Field, near Roanoke, Virginia, at 5:30 AM and had a difficult time following the trail. Much of it was overgrown, and the blazes were hard to see. She was surprised when the trail led directly to a large woven-wire fence. Beyond it was a huge metal apparatus she didn't recognize. The trail marks stopped, and she couldn't decide where she had gone wrong. She walked along the fence a way and came to a shorter barbed-wire fence, so she climbed through, being careful not to snag her trousers. She came out on a slag road and followed it down to the highway, then found the trail again. She climbed through two more barbed-wire fences, thinking it was odd, but pressing on nonetheless.

Then she saw them. A dozen young men came marching toward her in a tight group, staring at her as if she were a ghost. _Where's the Appalachian Trail?_ she called out. One of the men—she took him to be an officer—stepped out of the group and approached her. _You were supposed to take the parkway,_ he said. _Well, what're those marks for?_ she asked. _That was the old trail,_ he said. She didn't know it, but the year before, the Air Defense Command had established a radar station called Bedford AFS atop Apple Orchard Mountain, one cog in a deployment of dozens of mobile radar stations around the perimeter of the country. It was a massive security effort ten years into the Cold War. The squadron stationed atop the mountain was charged with spotting unidentified planes on the radar and guiding interceptor aircraft toward the intruders. The men watched the skies, but not so much the ground. Now they surrounded Ms. Emma Gatewood of Gallia County, Ohio, and they stood in shock. _Thank you,_ she said.

She turned and headed for the gate. The men were silent. As she approached, the guard came out of the shack rubbing his eyes, as if he'd been asleep. _How'd you get in here?_ he drawled in a hoarse voice. _I crawled through a few barbed-wire fences,_ she said. _I'm liable to get arrested and shot, aren't I?_ The guard grunted and unlocked the gate and let her out. When she was a safe distance away, she couldn't help but laugh. That night, she hunkered down on the front porch of an empty farmhouse. Cattle were grazing in the field nearby, but there was not a soul in sight. She pulled out her notebook. "I could hardly wait until I got away to burst into laughter at the ridiculous situation I had gotten into," she wrote. "The looks on those boys' faces." 6 OUR FIGHT JUNE 23-JULY 5, 1955 Her feet were a sight. Start with the toes, which were chipped and battered and appeared almost as though she had been kicking rocks. The middle three on each foot hooked permanently downward, almost vertical from the second joint to the tip, from being scrunched into too-small shoes for too long a time. Her small toes deviated toward the center, and on the outside of both feet were large bunions.

The most astonishing thing about her feet, though, were her big toes, which jutted toward the center at a forty-five-degree angle from her instep. Protruding from the spot where the metatarsal meets the phalange on her insteps were bulbous bunions the size of ball bearings. Her feet themselves were wide and flat and covered with veins like the lines on a map, and they ran shapelessly into oversized ankles, then up to narrow, battered, hourglass-curved shins and toward grotesque, gibbous knees surrounded by unnatural, tumorous outthrusts. Hers were well-worn legs and she hid her feet inside sneakers and her knees inside dungarees, both of which were getting wetter by the minute. She made her way along the rugged trail in a late-June downpour, over the Priest, elevation 4,063 feet, one of the highest gains in Virginia. She tramped down across the foaming cascades of the Tye River, and on to Reeds Gap, where she lost her rain hat. She walked back a piece to find it but had no luck. She was soaked to the bone by the time she found a man milking a cow beside the trail. His name was Campbell and she asked about a place to stay. He invited her back to his house, which was way down over a hill from the trail. The woman of the house, Sis Campbell, was in her eighties, and the house looked much older than her, and its furnishings seemed to have been original. Sis Campbell led Emma upstairs by candlelight, as the old home had no electricity.

The next morning was beautiful and she walked north through central Virginia. Some passersby mentioned a restaurant, a Howard Johnson's, in the vicinity of Waynesboro to the north, and she spent much of the day's hike thinking about hot food. She stopped at the first house to ask for directions. The family, Mr. and Mrs. E. B. Ricks, were very nice and invited her in to rest. Their home was lovely. They had a flagstone courtyard and the prettiest view of the valley Emma could imagine. They were taken by her stories and asked Emma to stay for supper. Mrs. Ricks in particular wouldn't stop with the questions. After Emma went to bed, she phoned the _News Virginian_ of Waynesboro. The next morning, they drove Emma the few miles into town. She had breakfast at a restaurant, then went to the drugstore for a few items, then headed across the street and waited for another store to open so she could buy a new pair of slacks, a raincoat, and some new shoes. She had just started to shop when a man saw her and hurried toward her, grinning ear to ear.

_I'm from the newspaper,_ he said. They'd found her again. The reporter had phoned Mrs. Ricks and she told him that Emma was in the store shopping for shoes. Emma didn't mind so much this time. Word was out, after all. She answered all the man's questions. Emma told him about her pack, how she had made it herself. He held it and figured it weighed about twelve pounds when full. He asked her how she had stayed warm on cold nights with no sleeping bag. She told him about heating flat rocks over a fire and reclining on them for warmth. She told him she couldn't sleep many nights for fear of bears. She hadn't seen one yet, but she'd seen plenty of signs they were around. She told him about the rattlesnake and that there weren't enough shelters along the trail and that she thought she'd finish by late September, "depending on how well I get along." She told him about the trail magic, and how welcoming some folks had been. "I have found a lot of lovely people who have taken me in for a night's lodging and food," she said. "I have also found some who didn't care to have me around."

He asked her impressions so far, and she couldn't help herself. That _National Geographic_ article made the journey seem so easy. "I have found the hike more rugged than I had heard," she said. When the interview was over, she bought a raincoat, shoes, socks, and some food and headed off again toward the trail, then toward Sawmill Shelter. That afternoon, the story ran on the front page of the _News Virginian,_ beneath the fold, under the headline: WOMAN, 67, HIKING FROM GEORGIA TO MAINE, ARRIVES IN WAYNESBORO. Many persons take to the easy chair when they reach the age of three score and seven years. But this is not the case for Mrs. Emma Gatewood, of Gallipolis, Ohio. Mrs. Gatewood, the mother of 11 children whose ages range from 27 to 47, on May 3 began to hike the [2,050] mile long Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. Since May 3, the 67-year-old woman has hiked 900 miles. The reporter asked Emma if she'd like for him to mail a clipping of his piece to her family in Ohio, three hundred miles due west of the spot where she was standing.

"The folks at home," she said, "don't know where I am." She could hide in the woods. Always. "I've always done a lot of walking in the woods," she'd tell a newspaper reporter years later. "The stillness and quiet of the forests has always seemed so wonderful and I like the peacefulness." Some people thought she was crazy, but she found a certain restfulness that satisfied her nature. The woods made her feel more contented. She was comfortable there, especially when her home was ruled by a tyrant. In later years, she would confide in her children that their father not only blacked her eyes and bloodied her lips but that his sexual appetite was insatiable. He demanded she submit to him several times a day. They didn't know it then, but they were used to their mother seeking haven in their beds, in the quiet of night, because she couldn't bear to lie next to him. The children saw what he did to her, and they'd carry the memories into their old age. The muffled noises that pierced the night. The bruises on her face. The trajectory of her waning patience. Rowena, the fifth born, would always remember her mother silhouetted in an upstairs window, looking out, when a hand grabbed her hair and cast her to the floor. She would remember screaming, and her older sister slapping her face to make her stop. Louise would remember her father telling her mother she was crazy and punching her in the face with his fist. Lucy, the youngest, would remember hearing a cry and running upstairs to find her father on top of her mother, his hands around her throat, her face turning black. Nelson would remember finding his father beating his mother, and lifting his father off of her long enough for her to run away, into the woods.

They'd carry the whispers with them: That he spent his money—their money—fulfilling his desires on Two Street in Huntington, West Virginia. That he had convinced the neighbors that his wife's complaints were the complaints of an insane person. Even when he broke a broom over her head, he could convince others that he really loved her. "Multiple times I was black and blue in a lot of places, but mostly my face," she wrote later. "I did not carry one single child that I did not get a slapping or beating during that time and several times he put me outside and told me to go. It was one grand nightmare to live with him with his maniacal temper. He would act so innocent and pretend he had not touched me and say I was not in my right mind and they would have to do something with me. He even asked me what asylum I wanted to go to and I told him Athens or O.H.E. or any place would be better than home." She sometimes fought back, which was also part of her nature. And she could hold her own. One story would be told for years to come.

Emma and P.C. were fighting, and the farmhands were working outside. She bolted out of the house and ran around behind a wagon full of corn and scrambled up onto the produce. P.C. came out right behind her, with purpose, and he grabbed a hoe that was leaning against the house. One of the hands stopped him. _"You're gonna kill her,"_ he said. _"Let him alone,"_ Emma shouted. _"This is our fight."_ As their relationship deteriorated, their financial difficulties were multiplying. P.C. wrote to his well-heeled cousin, Maybelle McIntyre, in 1935, asking for a loan to save the farm, but she would not lend him money. "Can't the farm board which has such things in hand do something about it?" she wrote. P.C. shared pieces of his domestic troubles with his cousin, who lived in New York and was married to O. O. McIntyre, one of the most famous writers of the time, whose "New York Day by Day" columns ran in some five hundred newspapers. Maybelle hired P.C. in 1937 to renovate her home in Gallipolis, and when he went over the budget she had outlined, he blamed the conflicts at home.

"Naturally you must know I am very sympathetic with your domestic troubles," Maybelle responded in November 1937, "but sorry as I am it just must not enter into this business deal. If you are too troubled to get down to the reports, some one must get them to me. That is business nothing else." Three weeks later, he had paid the bills and made amends. "I feel sure if you had not had your troubles at home you would have made the reports as you went along and there would have been no worry on either side," Maybelle wrote. "However I am glad it is over and I hope your affairs there will soon clear up." They did not clear up. Through it all, the woods were Emma's respite. Sometimes she'd walk away and be gone all day, or long enough, at least, for his mood to shift. The forest inspired her. She wrote poetry about springtime, about the rills frolicking and zephyrs gently swaying, about the bloodroot and windflower and the hepaticas deep within the forest. She wrote of the Ohio River bends and a romantic tugboat landing. She wrote of Christmastime, and of being alone. Some of her poetry was dark and seemed to speak to how she was feeling about her relationship.

She got her man, she has him roped His tongue hangs out as though he's choked She's sorta scared, her hair's a wreck She has her foot right on his neck Dames get desperate in times like these When men are scarce and hard to please This was her lot, and she could manage, until she felt she could not. He had been so cruel she didn't know whether she'd survive another beating. As the winter of 1937 set in, she told the children who were still living at home that she loved them and would send for them. She gave the older children instructions to take care of the younger ones, and she told them to always look out for each other. And then she slipped away. The trail through the beautiful Shenandoah National Park in Virginia was good, its long, gentle ascents not nearly as taxing as the previous thousand miles of mountains. The weather was even better. She put in twenty-one miles on June 28, and twenty on June 29, fueled primarily by wild black raspberries, and on June 30, after a good morning hike and a lunch at the Big Meadows Lodge, she bumped into a Boy Scout troop at a nearby campground. When the boys learned where she had been and what she was doing they wanted her picture and autograph and she obliged. She felt a little like a celebrity.

She found shelter on Hawksbill Mountain and caught some sleep, despite the black flies that pestered her through the night. She started at 5:30 AM the next day and was making good time through the narrow, one-hundred-mile-long park. The trail often ran alongside old stone field walls and Emma pictured someone riding in a carriage behind four horses. These hills had been home to Native Americans for thousands of years before European settlers began encroaching from the east, which started soon after an expedition crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains in the early 1700s. Many of the settlers came from Pennsylvania and staked out farms in the lowlands, and as prime property grew scarce they moved up into the mountains, clearing the land, hunting and trapping game and raising livestock. They made a life for themselves there for hundreds of years until the 1920s, when academics began to explore the social "problems" of the region: illiteracy, poverty, illegitimacy, sanitation. Grand plans were launched to move the people off the mountains, pave the ridge, and transform the land into something tourists from eastern cities might enjoy riding through. In 1926 Congress authorized the establishment of Shenandoah National Park and the state began acquiring land, at times forcing people to move against their will. In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps began building stone bridges, shelters, and lodges, and their handiwork was something to behold. The park was opened that year, and what once were pastures soon blossomed with the makings of what would become a mature wilderness.

Emma laid eyes on Skyland, a mountain resort opened in the 1890s by a gregarious businessman with a showman's flair, who invited city dwellers to get away from their urbanized, mechanized lives. The private resort had since been taken over by the park, but its lodges, which seemed to her to be made of bark, remained open to guests. She trudged on toward Maryland at a good clip, and on July 4, not far from Ashby Gap, she found three dollars beside the road. It was getting dark, so she used the lucky bills to get a room at a motel and ate five pieces of fried chicken—a feast. She crossed, finally, into Maryland, into a tiny town called Sandy Hook, which was just a smattering of houses alongside the railroad tracks, not far from the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. She introduced herself to Anna Fleming, who invited Emma to stay the night. That evening around dusk, she hiked up to Maryland Heights and sat on a cliff looking down upon the picturesque little town of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. One hundred seventy years before, Thomas Jefferson called the view "one of the most stupendous scenes in nature." In a book first published in France, he wrote that the scene alone, the passage of the Potomac River through the Blue Ridge and its crashing merger with the Shenandoah, was worth a trip across the Atlantic.

The town below her breathed history, from the narrow brick streets and proud little buildings to the church spires and hilltop cemetery. It was the place the abolitionist John Brown believed he could spark a revolution, to turn the tide of slavery in the South and redeem an oppressed people down the barrel of a Sharps carbine. The state of Virginia hanged him for treason. His raid, though, was a catalyst for the Civil War, during which Harpers Ferry changed hands eight times in battles, the last of which came ninety-one years to the day before Emma sat upon her cliff. It was, as both sides knew, a portal to invasion. And later still, it was the place where W. E. B. Du Bois and his peers launched the Niagara Movement, which would become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. So much change and inhumanity for one little place. So much bloodshed and cleansing, death and rebirth. "The scene was beautiful," she wrote in her journal. Then, on the day after Independence Day, she stood to her feet and walked back down the trail.

7 LADY TRAMP JULY 6–15, 1955 She could not find the trail. Someone had told her it ran through Harpers Ferry, so she followed a road out of Sandy Hook, Maryland, and crossed the Potomac River on a railroad bridge into town. She saw old trail blazes on telephone poles near St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church, but no trail. She hiked up to a cliff looking for signs until evening, when she came back into Sandy Hook. A man there told her the trail had been rerouted, and she set off in the other direction, along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, making it to Weverton, just two miles away, by nightfall. She hiked through Washington Monument State Park the next day, where the first monument to George Washington was built in 1827, and where, in the evening, she met a fire warden who invited her to sleep on a cot in his living room. He called the newspaper in Boonsboro and put Emma on the phone and here she sat, for the third time in seventeen days, answering questions she never intended to answer. It wasn't that they bothered her, but she didn't fully comprehend what the fuss was about.

The next day, as she tramped through Pen Mar Park and toward the Mason-Dixon Line, a brief dispatch from the AP was rolling off newspaper presses and being banded and loaded into bags and milk crates and onto the bicycles of boys and girls who would sling them onto the lawns and porches of hundreds of thousands of homes across the country. And as Emma hunkered down that night in a lean-to, Americans far and wide were reading the details of the long, lonely, improbable walk of a complete stranger. BOONSBORO, MD., JULY 8 - (AP) - After 66 days and nearly 1000 miles, Mrs. Emma Gatewood is still pretty determined to become the first woman ever to hike the 2050-mile Appalachian Trail alone—even if she is 67. The Gallipolis, Ohio, mother of 11 and grandmother of 23 emphasized this yesterday as she paused at the nearby Washington Monument State Park. At the rate she's going, Grandma Emma should make it to Mt. Katahdin, Me., sometime in September. She left the Mt. Oglethorpe, Ga., starting point, May 3.

Lugging a pack of about 35 pounds and spending the nights in her sleeping bag or some of the lean-to shelters along the way, she has worn out two pairs of shoes but none of her enthusiasm. "I'm a great lover of the outdoors," she explained. They got most of it right. The pack was lighter than thirty-five pounds, and she wasn't carrying a sleeping bag. And the way the hike was going, she'd be lucky to make it to Mount Katahdin by September, if she made it at all. The hardest part of the trail was ahead of her. Her celebrity was rising. More and more folks wanted her to stop and chat. Not to mention the unpredictable weather. In the Northwest, the summer of 1955 was shaping up to be the coldest and soggiest in years. Hay was mildewing in fields and strawberries had been stunted. But Chicago was on pace to have the hottest July on record since 1871, the year before the Great Fire. Drought plagued much of the Northeast. New York had put in an appeal to the federal government for drought aid. Meanwhile, Texas was so wet the farmers had stopped talking of pulling out of the Dust Bowl. Stranger still was a rare winter storm, which had formed on New Year's Eve and developed into Hurricane Alice on January 1 before dissipating a few days later. Historians in Puerto Rico had argued about whether it was the first winter storm of its kind. They remembered a similar storm in 1816 but couldn't decide whether it had formed in September or January. Either way, the storm had meteorologists baffled. "Possibly this may be another consequence of the general warming observed during the past several decades," wrote one National Weather Bureau meteorologist.

By the end of the year, the Weather Bureau would chart thirteen tropical storms, and would note that ten of those attained hurricane force, a number that had been exceeded only once before. They'd call the hurricane season of '55 the "most disastrous in history," and note that it "broke all previous records for damage." They'd hypothesize that in July, as Emma Gatewood hiked north through Maryland unaware, a planetary wave had formed over the North Atlantic and evolved like a tropical storm, and that at the ridge of the Azores, upper level anticyclone circulation thrust strongly northeastward into Europe and introduced a northeasterly flow that, through vorticity flux, produced an anomalously sharp and deep trough extending along the Spanish and African coasts. And at the base of that trough, they'd write, its genesis encouraged by the injection of cyclonic vorticity from the north and associated vertical destabilization, another storm would be born. Emma Gatewood knew none of this. Her world was insular, the trees and flowers and animals and elements. She drifted to sleep that night in a lean-to beside the trail.

The boys came, three of them, around midnight to camp at the shelter, and when they discovered an old woman inside, they turned to leave. Emma invited them back, told them there was plenty of room and she didn't mind at all to share the space. She left them sleeping the next morning and made good time across the state line into Pennsylvania, nearing Caledonia State Park, in a valley between Blue Mountain and South Mountain, land once owned by Thaddeus Stevens. She'd be in Pennsylvania for another 230 miles. She washed out some clothes and dried them by a fire and slept some before setting off again. She was climbing up the steep south bank of Chinquapin Hill when she heard something unnatural. She swung around and caught sight of a man who was huffing and puffing up the slope behind her. His hair fell in his eyes and he was having a hard time with the climb, but it seemed he wanted to catch up. Figuring he was a reporter, she stopped. The man introduced himself as Warren Large. He was a birdwatcher, and he'd read about her in the newspaper and set out that morning to try to find her. He said that he wouldn't take too much of her time, he just wanted to ask a few questions. Two or three, he said. The two sat on a log in the Pennsylvania woods and started talking. Two hours later, he said he'd better go. He got up and bid Emma good-bye and lots of luck. Then he sat back down and they went on talking another hour. On July 10, 1955, Warren Large missed church and Sunday school and Emma Gatewood called it a day.

She got a nice bunch of lettuce from Mrs. Meisenhalter in Michaux and some provisions in Pine Grove Furnace, finally arriving at the halfway point on the trail, a place named for its charcoal-fired blast furnace where firearms were made for the American Revolution. She was talking to the leader of a Boy Scout pack from Ohio when the forest warden called her to the telephone. It was the state park superintendent. He wanted to arrange an appointment with Conway Robinson, a radio and newspaper reporter from Baltimore. News had finally hit the big cities. Robinson wanted to meet Emma in Brantsville, Pennsylvania, so the next morning she started early, before 6:00 AM, but she got lost on a side trail. By the time she found her way, it was inching into afternoon and she still had miles to go. The section was particularly rocky, and everywhere she turned there were more rocks. It was 5:00 PM by the time she arrived in Brantsville. Robinson had been waiting all afternoon, but he took her back to the woods before sundown and shot photographs and film of her walking around. When he had enough, he recorded her voice. As a way of saying thanks, Robinson treated her to supper that evening.

She walked across the Pacific Coast Highway and into the sand and across the beach of an ocean she had never before seen. She wore Sunday shoes and a long-sleeved linen dress and a straw sun hat with a white flower affixed to the side. The California wind blew the saltwater and sand against her skin. A group of boys in full-length bathing suits splashed in the surf. The year was 1937. She stared at the ocean and beheld its simple beauty. So far from home, she wondered about her daughters. She had slipped away to come west, a journey most of her family had made years before. Her mother and a brother were in California, and a sister had a place in Santa Ana—and an extra bed. She had relayed that it would be no bother to have a houseguest until things settled down in Gallia County. Emma enjoyed catching up, and her mother offered warm sympathies for her struggles back home. But the sadness of leaving her children had left Emma heartbroken. She couldn't have afforded to make it here with them, and she knew that P.C. wouldn't treat them like he had treated her. She'd moved to California once before, bringing Louise, an infant, after a brutal beating, but it was temporary. She stayed for nearly a year, then moved back to Ohio when P.C. promised things would change. This time was different. She wasn't sure she'd ever go back.

_First sight of ocean, between Seal and Huntington Beaches, 1926._ Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds Emma felt pangs of guilt for leaving her children. But what choice did she have? P.C. had violated her for the last time, and if she wasn't strong enough to keep him away, her only option was to leave, to head west. On November 18, 1937, she wrote to her daughters and tucked the two-page letter into an envelope with no return address. Dear Louise and Lucy: I have wanted to write to you all the time but did not want your dad to know where I was. He is the worst nightmare I ever heard of. I wish to the great I am he would leave me alone. I do not want him around and he just might as well give up. Yesterday he wired me a large bunch of mums and not wanting to look at them I immediately took them to the cemetery and put them on Father's and Myrta's graves. I will bet you could use a new dress, shoes, or coat. I can not possibly ever think of coming back while he is there and there is not any use for him to keep pestering me. I try not to think of you and all the things I could and would love to do for you. Will just live in hopes things will change so that I can be with you sometime. You be patient and good so that you will not cause so much misery as your dad has. I would still be with you if he had just kept his hand to himself in spite of all the ugly things he said to me. But that is all past now. It is just too bad and too late. If he bothers me anymore I will go to some foreign country and I will bet he will not bother me. I hope I will never see his old face again. I have suffered enough at his hands to last me for the next hundred years.

Living in hopes I can be with you again sometime, I am yours with tons of love, Mama The girls read the letter at home in Gallia County. They were eleven and nine and old enough to understand the pain packed into it. They had been their father's tools, too, writing at his command about how much they missed her and how much they wanted to see her and how she should, please, come home. They knew, even then, that they were part of a charade, but they cooperated. And the letters continued. The road was flat and barren, a two-lane ribbon of asphalt that unspooled before her, and she thought it would never end. Her feet were sore. All day she was on the highway, and she hiked over the new Pennsylvania Turnpike, America's first toll road, which extended east to the Delaware River and west to her home state of Ohio. She saw a house around 5:30 that evening, and without even asking, she walked up and plopped down on the front porch. The people inside, the McAllister family, looked through the windows at the scruffy stranger. She got the impression that they thought she was batty, and she wasn't about to correct them. She was too tired. They finally asked her who she was and Emma told them what she was doing. They warmed up a bit and invited her to supper, and once they had eaten, the McAllisters asked if she wanted to stay the night.

The next day the hike took her over sharp, jagged rocks all morning, remnants of the glaciers of the last ice age that scraped them south before retreating. The section was the rockiest on the trail, and each stone seemed to be purposefully placed on edge. She desperately needed new shoes. She had sliced the sides of the pair she was wearing to make them more comfortable, to give her bunions room to breathe, but her feet were swelling from all the walking. A little after 11:00, she arrived on the outskirts of Duncannon, Pennsylvania. She was wearing Bermuda shorts and she was already in town by the time she thought about changing into her dungarees. A cluster of children were playing on their front porch and, upon seeing her coming up the road, one little boy hollered. "Look!" he told his playmates. "There goes a lady tramp!" Emma kept walking. It wasn't the first or last time she'd been pointed out in derision, and she didn't let it stop her. A few minutes later, the lady tramp crossed the mighty Susquehanna River and popped into a little restaurant at the end of the bridge. She ordered a tomato sandwich and chased it with a banana split to lift her spirits.

After her dinner, she went in search of water. By 9:00 PM, she still hadn't found any. She fished her flashlight from her sack and stood beside the road, waving the light in hopes a car would stop. When one finally did, it held two women and their children. Emma told them she was looking for a place to stay—or some water at least. She piled in and they drove fifteen miles before the woman pulled up to a house where Emma spent the night. The homeowner drove her back to the trail the next morning. Besides the throbbing in her feet, the hike through eastern Pennsylvania, about one hundred miles west of Philadelphia then, was easy. The difficulty was finding a place to stay. She walked fifteen miles on July 15 before she approached a large house to ask if they had extra room. She could see a woman inside doing housework, but when the woman came to the door she claimed she had arthritis and wouldn't invite Emma in. At the next house she came to, the homeowner said he didn't have any extra beds or room. She tried eight houses in a row and was turned away at each one.

The next house she came to was little bitty, and a buxom blonde answered the door. The woman said she didn't have an extra bed, but she sent the children to an outbuilding, where they prepared a cot for Emma. She told them she preferred the front porch swing, if that was OK, and she fell asleep there that hot summer night as the woman washed her clothes in a machine. 8 ATTENTION JULY 16–26, 1955 The sharp rocks were killing her feet, each step a new jolt of pain. Emma didn't wear the hard-soled boots of a seasoned outdoorsman but rubber-soled sneakers that quickly wore out. In an emergency, she had taped the discarded rubber heel from a man's shoe to the bottom of her instep for more arch support. Her footwear was more akin to the moccasins worn by Daniel Boone, who was born in the vicinity and used to hunt and fish in these hills as a boy. Happy to let her feet heal, she spent the night at the Hertlein Campsite and made it into the narrow little town of Port Clinton, Pennsylvania, the next afternoon. She poked into a store to see about getting a new pair of shoes. The place was a wreck, the worst disorder she'd ever seen. Boxes were piled high and there was a layer of dust on everything she touched. She bought a few snacks and sat on the porch out front for a bit before heading down the street to see about a room at the King Fish Hotel. Just then, a woman in a nearby house hollered.

_Are you the woman who is walking the trail?_ she asked. _I am,_ said Emma. The woman, Mrs. Swayberger, was very excited, and that made Emma happy. The woman told her son to stand next to Emma for a photograph, and the woman's daughter insisted Emma follow her around the corner to meet her husband, who was interested in the trail. She had again been recognized. Word about her hike was spreading like prairie fire. The Associated Press dispatch from Boonsboro, Maryland, had made it all the way to Gallia County, in fact, and the newspaper ran a follow-up story on the local woman who was getting national attention. Her exact whereabouts since she left here early in April to "go south" were not known until Friday afternoon when word came from Boonsboro, Md., of her progress along the trail which winds from Mt. Oglethorpe, Ga., through 14 states, eight national forests and two national parks, to its northern terminus atop Mt. Katahdin, Maine, some 5,200 feet above sea level. The reporter interviewed Monroe, Emma's oldest son, who was the wire chief for Ohio Bell Telephone Company in Gallia County. Monroe seemed surprised, but not worried.

"We did not know for sure what she was doing until just yesterday, although we were beginning to have our suspicions," he said. "Mother is a great lover of the outdoors, enjoys perfect health, and can outwalk most persons many years younger." On a stretch of the A.T. through Berks County, Pennsylvania, Emma bumped into a group of Boy Scouts from the Shikellamy Scout Reservation, who promptly reported back to a columnist at the _Reading Eagle._ Emma had told the boys that she'd so far detoured for three copperheads and two rattlesnakes, and that she'd slept outdoors on a handful of freezing nights. The boys were mystified that she was wearing tennis shoes, the columnist reported. "She was wearing sneakers, and supposedly expert counsel on hiking comfort advises the wearing of stout shoes of good weight—not too heavy but tough enough to stand hard wear," the columnist wrote. "When you're a 67-year-old woman on a 2,050-mile hike, though, maybe there isn't another person in the world who qualifies as an expert on how to take care of your own feet."

News of her walk had even reached a young writer at a fledgling magazine called _Sports Illustrated_ in New York City. Reporter Mary Snow began to wonder whether the eccentric grandmother on the Appalachian Trail might make for a good profile. The newspaper stories had addressed the _Who, What, Where, When,_ and _How,_ but no reporter had touched on the most important, intriguing question: _Why?_ Snow would. But first things first: how do you track down someone in the wilderness who is hiking at a clip of fourteen miles a day? Meanwhile, Emma had her own problems, besides her swollen feet. She had left Port Clinton, Pennsylvania, after a good night's rest, enjoyed a lovely walk the next afternoon, bunked in a cabin at Blue Mountain for a dollar, then headed for Palmerton, Pennsylvania, on the morning of July 19. She tried to rent a hotel room, but the folks there wouldn't let her stay. She wondered what she must look like. She had found a faucet that morning and washed her face, but without a comb she had no way to brush the knots out of her iron-gray hair. She had sifted through a campfire and found a fork, which she used as a comb. Now, though, she was leaving yet another hotel, exhausted and wondering where she should go for the night.

She was walking down the road's shoulder when a car pulled up beside her in the dusk. Driving was a young woman from the hotel who appeared burdened by her conscience. She asked Emma to climb in, saying she wanted to take her into Palmerton proper. A few minutes later they pulled up at a hotel and Emma got a room for the night for two dollars. She soaked her feet in a bath and walked down the street to Sally's Restaurant for a sandwich. Someone there told her she needed to meet Ralph Leh and the waitress, Sally, got him on the phone. Leh, bespectacled and seventy, was retired from New Jersey Zinc Co., and he was quite the hiker himself. Besides climbing Mount Washington, he had spent the spring before helping clear the Appalachian Trail to Devil's Pulpit on the Lehigh Gap. He knew that section of the trail like the back of his hand. Leh invited Emma to stay at his house, so she fetched her bag from the hotel and showed up on his front porch. The two talked into the night, forming a bond that would last for years. Leh called up the newspaper in Allentown and two journalists came for yet another interview. The reporter asked her what surprised her most about the hike.