Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (21 page)

The old woman of the mountains kept climbing, up and up the steep ascent of bald rocks, and finally came to the Greenleaf Hut on Mount Lafayette, where she got a bite to eat before continuing on to Galehead Hut, kept tidy by two college students, caretakers there, who kindly prepared her dinner.

She walked to Zealand Falls Hut the next afternoon and got some food and raisins for the trail. She started again down the slope and walked a while before she realized she was lost. The trail was unmarked but clearly a trail, and so she kept going for several hours until she came to a little campground just as the sun was sliding behind the mountains. A man had set up camp there. When she explained her predicament, he offered to drive her back as far as he could, and she accepted. She walked a little farther in the night and slept beside the trail.

She made it the rest of the way back to the path the next morning and walked through a boggy plateau to Wiley House Station,
then toward Mount Webster. The climb, from the beginning, was steep and rough. She came to a ladder where the rungs were so far apart that she had to plant one foot on the cliff face and pull herself up until she could get her knee over the next rung, then get her foot on it. It was difficult climbing.

A few miles later she came to a spot where the trail stretched alongside a bluff, so close to the edge of a cliff that she was afraid she’d fall off. Falling happened to be the number one cause of death in these parts. The wind was strong, too—giant gusts of cold air coming up the face of the cliff. She tried to time the gales, waiting for a break so she could shimmy across. She worked up her confidence and then went for it, between gusts, and she made it behind a clump of pine trees to safety.

She climbed Mount Jackson that afternoon, where she misread a trail sign and again took the wrong path. A woman she met on the trail put in a good word with the forest warden at Crawford Notch, and he let Emma stay the night with him.

The next morning, her knee was causing her pain, and though the days were bearably mild, the cold was slicing through the mountains at night. Emma knew she’d need extra provisions as August faded toward September. She made it to the scenic Lakes of the Clouds Hut, on the southern shoulder of Mount Washington, where she had lunch before summiting. The sky was bright and clear at the top and a large number of tourists had gathered to take in the sights. They gaped at the wrinkled, trail-stained woman suddenly in their presence. She wouldn’t return the favor. Two boys walked up and sheepishly introduced themselves, then asked her questions about the trail.

She set off again for Mount Adams, following the trail as it bent along the crest of the Presidential Range, above the trees. Her knee was still bothering her and the trail was rugged. In the evening, as she approached Madison Spring Hut, she heard a group of men, women, and children talking and laughing. When she got close
enough she could make out about fifteen people in the group. She knew they saw her, and suspected they had been waiting for her, but she sat down on a rock behind some evergreens, being coy. She decided she’d make them come to her, and before long, they did. They had been expecting her, and they brought out their cameras to take her picture.

One of the women, Ruth Pope, gave Emma a bandage for her knee. Another, Jean Lees, gave her some wool gloves and a ski hat, which Emma stowed in her sack. They made her feel welcome and treated her with respect and kindness. The hut master didn’t even charge her the six dollars for a bunk, and she thanked him by giving him her green eyeshade, autographed.

She wrapped her knee in the morning, and the two women she met the night before volunteered to carry her sack. They broke off at Pinkham Notch and took a trail through Wildcat Mountains. When they found Emma again they were arguing about which one of them had carried the pack the longest. Emma reached Carter Notch after dark and accidentally stepped on her glasses. The frames were broken but she had brought along another pair, a lesson learned from her experience in Maine the year before.

She tackled another mountain the next day, twice, because she misread signs; she blamed her own ignorance and a poorly marked trail. Her mileage had slowed considerably as she neared the Maine state line on account of her injury, the brutal climbs, and the occasional misdirection. A boy in the woods set her on the right path that day, and by then it was raining again.

When she reached the hut in the evening, she couldn’t believe her eyes. The hut master had made a huge meal, and she was hungry. On top of that, they didn’t charge her anything for the meal or the bunk. All her clothes were wet, so she made a dress from a blanket by forming pleats with safety pins. She made it work and dried her clothes by the fire. She topped Carter Dome the following
day, August 31, and found Imp Shelter, which had a stove and made for a nice place to spend the last night of August.

The next day she walked over Mount Moriah, onto the highway, and followed it into Gorham, New Hampshire, for supplies. She found supper and a nice bed at Androscoggin Inn, where Mrs. Tanner kept the big and beautiful white house.

She left Gorham early and walked over jagged and rocky trail the next day, over Mount Hayes and Cascade Mountain, by Passage Pond and Moss Pond, up over Mount Success, and then, without any fanfare, she crossed the state line into Maine, climbing Mount Carlo. As the sun faded, she realized she had missed the shelter down below. She found two boys on the top of the 3,565-foot peak, sitting on rocks, but as darkness fell they descended toward the shelter she must have missed. The night was pleasant, so she scouted out a place to sleep outdoors and found a thick bed of moss that was perfect, the kind of soft a rich man with a trick back would pay to have made. She stretched out facing the sky.

The night was clear and the moon seemed close enough to touch. Its light fell on the short pines and the mossy bald around her. The stars were millions of pinpricks of light in a blanket of darkness.

So much was behind her. So many memories and trials and miles. She’d made it into her fourteenth and final state, where September snowstorms weren’t rare, where freezing temperatures could make even the heartiest mountain men call it quits and head for shelter. Maine was rugged. Maine was wild. In forty years, Maine would
still
have more uninhabited forest than any other continental state.

She couldn’t have known it then, but much of America was pulling for her, clipping newspaper articles at kitchen tables and watching her traipse across the evening news on television, wondering whether she’d survive, this woman, in so mean a place. She carried their hopes along with her, but hers was a solitary walk—for peace, for serenity, for herself.

She stood that night, all alone, just 280 miles from that little brown sign atop Mount Katahdin, her chest full of crisp air and inspiration, her feet firm atop a forgettable mountain where the stars make you feel insignificant and important all at once.

And she sang.

In the late 1800s, just before Emma was born, an old man began walking clockwise on a nonstop 365-mile ovular route between
the Connecticut and Hudson Rivers, a trip that took him precisely thirty-four days to complete. And then he did it again, and again— for more than thirty years. He was clothed entirely in leather. He had hand-made a suit, jacket, pants, and hat out of hide, and he came to be called “Old Leatherman.” He slept in caves and natural shelters along his track where he kept gardens and stored food. Though he walked through dozens of towns, garnering enough attention after a few cycles that people set their watches by him, no one knew who he was. Although he was friendly enough to occasionally sit for a photograph, he didn’t speak, and only once in a while grunted something low and unintelligible. Some thought he was French.

A myth developed about his origins, one that was never proven. The story had it that he was born Jules Bourglay, in Lyons, France, and that as a young man he had fallen in love with the daughter of a wealthy leather trader. He asked the merchant for his daughter’s hand, and the merchant struck a deal: if Bourglay would work for him for a year, he would give his blessing to the marriage.

Bourglay agreed. But the business soon failed, due mostly to several of Bourglay’s bad decisions. The wedding was off. Crushed, the young man went into hiding, then disappeared to the United States, where he set out on his continuous trip to walk his lover out of his mind, or assuage his guilt, or maybe none of that. Who is to know? Every eccentric needs a story, and if one is not provided, one will be created.

Despite Old Leatherman’s mystique, Edward Payson Weston was probably America’s most famous pedestrian. In 1860, he bet his friend that Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t win the presidency. In 1861, he walked nearly five hundred miles, from Boston to Washington, DC, for Lincoln’s inauguration, arriving a few hours late but in time to attend the inaugural ball. He launched his pro career a few years later, walking thirteen hundred miles from Portland,
Maine, to Chicago in twenty-six days. Two years later he walked five thousand miles for $25,000. Two years after that, the showman walked backward for two hundred miles. He competed in walking events against the best in Europe. Once, in his old age, he staged a New York to San Francisco one-hundred-day walk, but he arrived five days late. Peeved, he walked back to New York in seventy-six days. He told a reporter he wanted to become the “propagandist for pedestrianism,” to impart the benefits of walking to the world. A devout pedestrian, he preached walking over driving. Unfortunately, he was seriously injured in 1927 when a taxicab crashed into him in New York, confining him in a wheelchair for the remainder of his life.

Weston wasn’t the first long-distance walker who gained attention for his physical feats. Many came before him, including Lieutenant Halifax, who walked six hundred miles in twenty days. Foster Powell walked two hundred miles from London to York, England, and back in five days. In 1932, a man seen walking backward in Berlin turned out to be a Texan attempting to walk around the world backward wearing special glasses affixed with mirrors.

Later, in 1951, a New York couple claimed they had spent the previous twenty years walking city streets for a total of more than fifteen thousand miles. They said they had walked every single street of the five boroughs of New York City and had walked the varied boulevards of cities like Pittsburgh, Boston, Baltimore, and Denver. They became known as “America’s Walkingest Couple.”

The celebrated Captain Robert Barclay, a Scot, deliberately walked a mile in each of one thousand successive hours. The challenge took six weeks in 1809. If a normal human walks three to four miles per hour, then Barclay’s attempt to walk just one mile per hour for one thousand hours stood apart for the sheer difficulty in pacing. Once every hour, he walked a mile, and stopped to rest.
Huge crowds came to watch, and journalists wrote of the event as though it were edge-of-your-seat entertainment.

Whether it was on a bet or to gain fame, to challenge oneself against nature or to pay amends for a lost love, those noted walkers—most all of them—had a purpose. In most cases, they let it be known. Mildred Lamb even wore a blue tunic that said
PEACE
PILGRIM
on the front and 25,000
MILES ON
FOOT FOR
PEACE
on the back. But the cases in which the motivations were held secret—as with Old Leatherman—observers, by nature, had to create a story to understand why one would set out on foot, leaving the shelters we build to plant us in civilization and set us apart from the world, the cars and houses and offices. To follow a path great distances, to open oneself to the world and a multitude of unexpected experiences, to voluntarily face the wrath of nature unprotected, was difficult to understand.

Emma Gatewood was coy when people asked why, at her age, she had decided to strike out on the long trail. As America’s attention turned more toward Emma in her final days on the A.T., as newspaper reporters ramped up their dispatches to update the public on her condition and whereabouts, she offered an assortment of reasons about why she was walking. The kids were finally out of the house. She heard that no woman had yet thru-hiked in one direction. She liked nature. She thought it would be a lark.