Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (15 page)

A hurricane was born.

A reconnaissance plane spotted the eye of the storm, which was pushing winds at fifty-five knots and surging west-northwest over
the warm North Atlantic waters at sixteen miles per hour, slowly increasing in size and intensity, sucking up moist tropical air from the surface and discharging cooler air aloft, breathing in and out and growing as if it were a living thing. When the eye of the storm passed fifty miles north of the northern Leeward Islands and Puerto Rico, maximum winds were estimated at 125 miles per hour and the storm had splayed heavy rain bands, like fingers, for miles in all directions.

In the coming days, Hurricane Connie would change direction, stall, spin north, then northwest, avoiding Florida and lining up to slam North Carolina and rake its way up the Atlantic seaboard toward southern New England, toward towns that would need new maps and people who would lose their lives and their loved ones and spend terrible hours clinging to treetops as floodgates crashed and rivers escaped their banks.

In those slow days before the hurricane made landfall, though, before the obituaries had been written and before the nation’s news magazines had questioned whether the weather of 1955 was the worst in recorded history, the people of New England set about their daily routines. The same was true for the stranger in the tiny town of Amesville, Connecticut, who woke at Eva Bates’s house a little before six o’clock, slung her bag on her shoulder, and rejoined the Appalachian Trail. Emma walked until she came to a low, swampy stretch in the woods, where the mosquitoes rose from the earth in thick clouds. She slapped at them a few times and then hurried to higher ground, where she stopped to thin them out.

Sick of fighting the biting bugs, she walked into a town to pick up some repellant oil from a dime store. Salisbury, Connecticut, wasn’t much more than a wide spot in the road, but years before, it was known as the “Arsenal of the Revolution.” For two hundred years, men pulled iron ore from the ground and shaped it into implements and guns and cannons.

As Emma was leaving town, a woman recognized her as the hiking grandmother from the newspaper and called out across the street. She invited Emma inside and served her milk and sweet cakes. A few minutes after she had started down the trail again, she saw a man standing in the road with a camera hanging around his neck. He asked her if he could take her photograph. She didn’t mind. Ten minutes later, a reporter from the paper stopped her again and questioned her about the journey. This was becoming routine, and she wondered if she’d ever make it to Maine.

She surged forward, up Lions Head at the southern end of the Taconic Range, up Bear Mountain, the highest summit in Connecticut, across the Sages Ravine, its waterfalls dancing over moss-covered rock, where she saw her first porcupine, then into Massachusetts, leaving nine states behind her now on day number ninety-three.

That afternoon, she hiked a ways with a pack of Boy Scouts, but by nightfall they had not found shelter and so the boys stopped to set up camp. Emma left them behind and climbed Mount Everett. There she found a fire tower but could not find a shelter. Everett’s vistas were breathtaking, but it was too rocky to sleep on the precipice, so she went a bit farther and raked together a pile of leaves beside a boulder as darkness fell.

Before she drifted off, Emma heard a voice. It belonged to one of the scout leaders. She got up and found them at the summit, flashlight beams shining through the trees, where they were searching for the shelter. Even with a trail map the leaders could not find it. They left the scouts with Emma and went stomping around in the darkness. The boys looked thirsty, and Emma had a little water in her canteen. She offered it to them, but they refused to take it. When the leaders returned, she went back to her trail-side bed of leaves.

The rain started the next day, on August 5.

What was already a slow slog grew slower. Emma made it just two and a half miles in the morning. She met a man that afternoon, Joe Seifert of Newark, New Jersey, who was thru-hiking the trail in the opposite direction, from north to south. They talked an hour but the downpour grew so heavy they could not continue their conversation. After sunset, Emma noticed a cluster of three houses, but no one would invite her in. She climbed over another mountain in the rain and finally found a kind soul, a woman named Mrs. Norris. The next evening, after another day of hiking through the rain, she tried to stay with a man named Moore, but he didn’t have room. He offered his car. She reclined in the seat and caught a decent night’s sleep. It was better than a picnic table by a mile.

The rain clouds parted momentarily the next morning and Emma hiked into Washington, Massachusetts, where Mrs. Fred Hutchinson started to fill her canteen, thinking she was a berry picker, until Emma spoke up and got herself invited to dinner, then to a nap on the couch, then to the obligatory newspaper interview, then to a night in a bed.

The morning of Monday, August 8, Emma traversed Warner Hill and Tully Mountain, near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and was approaching Dalton when Hurricane Connie reached its maximum intensity five hundred miles east of West Palm Beach, Florida, moving north-northwest at fifteen miles per hour, drawing a bead on the East Coast. Its winds were churning at 135 miles per hour near the eye, and gales extended 350 miles farther north. A navy reconnaissance plane measured the eye. It was forty miles wide.

The pilot, Lt. Commander R. T. Pittman of Covington, Georgia, called Hurricane Connie “the biggest storm I’ve ever seen.”
Another, Lieutenant Alfred M. Fowler of Waterloo, Iowa, gave this description:

In the eye, you would think you were sitting in the middle of a big amphitheatre. All around you in a huge circle were bands of white clouds. Below was a deck of stratocumulus clouds and above was the bright blue sky. We flew up to 10,000 feet and the walls of the amphitheater still rose above us.

It was hot and wet in the center, as well, full of eighty-six-degree tropical air.

The National Weather Bureau issued small craft warnings for boats from Block Island, Rhode Island, to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, as people along the Atlantic Coast brought lawn furniture inside and stocked up on nonperishables and hammered storm shutters over windows. The bureau called it a “severe” hurricane, but no one yet knew the course the storm would choose.

“We’re sweating it out,” Walter Davis, a storm warning forecaster in Miami, told the Associated Press. “Our best judgment is that Connie will be affected by the southern portion of the trough and will turn northward, then northeastward. Time will tell.”

By that afternoon, as Emma popped into the post office at Dalton, where the clerk recognized her and introduced her to everyone in the room, the giant storm rushed northwest, swelling, gaining strength. Warning flags flapped from Cape Lookout, North Carolina, to Norfolk, Virginia, and the tides grew by three feet. Seven hundred airmen from the air force, army, navy, and marines hustled to move planes and vehicles inland from the coast, to Spartanburg, South Carolina. Giant waves lapped at coastal beaches and gales of seventy-five miles per hour stretched three hundred miles north of the eye. The North Carolina Highway Patrol, Red Cross disaster specialists, and Civil Air Patrol personnel organized for rescue missions.

That evening, as Emma walked into Cheshire, Massachusetts, and checked in at Leroy’s Tourist Home, something else had become evident in the Atlantic, as well. Ships traveling five hundred miles from the northernmost Leeward Islands, well behind the hurricane, were reporting new bands of heavy rain and east winds up to forty-five miles per hour. While Hurricane Connie slogged toward the coast, another threatening storm was developing in its wake.

The second storm had forecasters baffled. Would it peter out and disappear in the Atlantic? Would it weaken as another trough passed to the north? Or would it intensify and follow Connie toward the United States, setting up a nightmarish situation for the people along the coast?

Before her, through the dark and low-slung clouds that raced north on the morning of August 9, stood the highest point in Massachusetts: Greylock Mountain. If the Berkshires behind her were light and inviting, Greylock, at 3,491 feet, served as a domineering challenge.

The mountain inspired some of the greatest authors of American literature. Herman Melville drew inspiration from Greylock while working on
Moby-Dick,
105 years before Emma marched through. He thought the mountain looked like a whale, and he had a view of it from his writing room in Pittsfield. Henry David Thoreau wrote about his 1844 climb in
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,
summiting the mountain a year before his experiment at Walden Pond. There was, no doubt, something special about the mountain, but the two men took distinctly different views. The themes in
A Week
and Melville’s “The Piazza,” a story set on Greylock, both involve a man on a quest who meets a woman. To the narrator in “The Piazza,” the woman, a “fairy queen sitting at her fairy-window,” represents a disappointment; he had
climbed the mountain to investigate the magical source of light he had seen from town below, and he finds an orphaned, isolated girl who had been wondering from afar about a similar curious light coming from his house down below. For Thoreau, the mountain woman had “lively sparkling eyes” and was “full of interest in the lower world from which I had come” and he thinks of “returning to this house, which was well kept and so nobly paced, the next day, and perhaps remaining a week there, if I could have entertainment.” Scholars would wonder for decades to come about the opposing views of Greylock, of nature represented by a woman on
a mountain. But rare would be the conversation about why both female characters were stagnant and isolated from the world below.

Here came another sojourner, more than a century later, this time a woman with the wind at her back, summiting Greylock at noon and finding a mountaintop restaurant where she sat to enjoy a hamburger, a glass of milk, and, for dessert, a bowl of ice cream, before making her descent toward North Adams and bedding down in the wild beside the trail, completely comfortable.

She continued through the Berkshires the next day, and randomly three high school boys and six girls joined her as she ventured through a valley and into the forest. They were talking and laughing as Emma told them about her trip.

I wish my grandmother was like you,
said one of the girls.

Emma felt like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Around dusk, the girls headed back, but the boys continued walking with Emma. They led her to a freshwater spring and collected leaves to make her a bed nearby. Then they wished her well and headed back up the trail. She wrote about the boys and girls in her diary, and how much fun she’d had, and she relaxed on the leaves and finally found sleep.