Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (10 page)

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.”

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: W
OMAN,
67, H
IKING FROM
G
EORGIA TO
M
AINE,
A
RRIVES IN
W
AYNESBORO.

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.”