Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (23 page)

Emma walked on to the East Carry Pond camps and rented a cabin. Franklin Gaskell ran the camps and his wife was out of town, so Emma cooked a biscuit supper for the man and his son. The next morning, Gaskell knocked on Emma’s cabin door and told her she should join them for breakfast. He had a surprise.

She sat down at the table and he scraped several small fried trout onto her plate. The pond was thick with them. Emma had never eaten trout before and she loved the meal, devouring each one.

She followed a tote road past Pierce Pond and on a few more miles to the Kennebec River, arriving in the afternoon. There was no bridge across the swift-flowing, rocky stream. A forest warden, Bradford Pease, met her there with a canoe. He handed her a fat life preserver and she climbed aboard, bundled in a head scarf against the cold. Pease paddled Emma across the river to Caratunk, where a small crowd was waiting. Chief Warden Isaac Harris tugged the canoe onto the bank and greeted Emma. A reporter snapped her photograph as she climbed out of the canoe and stepped ashore, clutching her walking stick. She remembered then that she had dropped her raincoat on the far shore, so the warden started back across to fetch it.

Emma told the reporter she was determined to finish, but her pace had slowed from twelve miles a day to eight. “I’m having a little difficulty with my knee,” she said. “Thought I’d rest overnight.”

She learned from the reporter, an older woman herself, that the past few nights, including the night Emma had slept in the open shelter at Jerome Brook, the temperature had fallen well below freezing. Emma wasn’t surprised. The nights had been bitterly cold. But walking and climbing in the mornings had thawed her.

“It didn’t take me long to warm up,” she said.

Her photograph ran on the AP wire and was reprinted in newspapers across the country with headlines such as H
IKING
G
RANNY
R
EACHES
M
AINE
, H
IKING
G
ALLIPOLIS
G
RANDMA
G
ETS
R
EST
N
EAR
G
OAL
, and O
HIO
G
RANDMA
N
EARING
E
ND
OF
H
IKE
.

She walked to where the trail left the small town of Caratunk and then the reporter took her back to a large farmhouse called the Sterling Hotel for the night. Her clothes were wet again, so Emma asked the proprietor if she could dry them by the fire and kitchen stove. Emma made a skirt out of her blanket and spread the clothes out in the heat.

The next day was brutal as she approached the 100-Mile Wilderness. The trail was horrible with tangles of briers and swamp grass, made worse by the fact that she could barely see with only one lens in her glasses. She still walked hard and she had put in more than fifteen miles before she decided to quit for the day, but shelter was nowhere to be found. A campsite would have to do. The temperature had started to fall. Emma scrambled around collecting enough firewood to keep a flame burning all night. Her blanket and clothes did little to keep the warmth in or the hard cold out. She slept on the ground by the fire, rotating from side to side to keep warm, her breath rising like smoke. Fear kept her awake—not of bears or moose, but of catching herself on fire.

She rose early and walked ten miles by noon to the village of Blanchard, where an old man sold her breakfast for fifty cents, then she chipped off a few more miles to Monson, the last place to stock
up on supplies before the 100-Mile Wilderness. She bought some groceries and tucked in at a motel kept by Sadie Drew in Monson. The walk through the forest was nice the next morning, though all the cabins at Bodfish Farm had been rented. One young couple let Emma stay with them. They served her supper and breakfast and didn’t charge her for the night’s sleep.

On September 19, her good fortune changed. The trail passed through a region of thick timber and several stretches were clogged with dense berry bushes. They snagged her dungarees and there was no clear path through. She could scarcely keep track of the
trail, much less blaze her way through the bushes. She climbed five peaks in the Barren Chairback Range, over rocks and around roots and through gullies and past the old stumps of white birches. Darkness had fallen by the time she walked into the Long Pond Camps, exhausted. A man showed Emma to her cabin and served her supper before she took a quick bath and fell asleep.

The tote road that carried her to White Cap Mountain was smooth, the walking easy if a bit chilly. From the top, on a clear day, Katahdin can be seen on the horizon, some seventy miles away. But once she got over the 3,654-foot peak, the hike grew miserable. There had been a forest fire. The trail blazes were few and far between. She had to wade through icy water for a section. There were no shelters in sight, so she walked two miles off the trail and got a nice cabin at the West Branch Pond Camps from Robert Tremblay, who owned the place. He brought her back to the trail the next morning and she again fought through a nightmarish and desolate patch of wilderness before stumbling upon the old shambles of a logging camp, which had been abandoned. Most of the buildings looked like they’d fall down with a decent push. She found the one that seemed the safest—or had a roof, at least. Inside, the floor was lined with long wooden benches, where she made a bed.

She fell the next day, coming down a hillside. It was not a fall that stopped her, but a fall bad enough to sprain her ankle, bruise her eye, and break her glasses, leaving her hobbling nearly blind for the last leg of the trail. She limped into Nahmakanta Lake, though, and hoped the dead red fox she found in front of the lean-to wasn’t an omen that things would get worse. She got two long sticks and carried the carcass far into the woods. When she returned she cleaned the spot where it had been decomposing before bedding down for the night.

She hiked along the shoreline the next morning and stopped for lunch at the Nahamakanta Lake Camps, then walked blindly the
last ten miles to Rainbow Lake, arriving around 4:30
PM
. Katahdin jutted from the earth above the tree line on the opposite bank, and the sinking sun lit its peak. As Emma walked into camp, she recognized some of the men she’d met the year before. They were surprised to see her, after the experience last year, but they were ecstatic. They couldn’t believe she’d come all the way from Georgia. One of the men washed Emma’s clothes for her and she dried them on a line in Cabin 5, the same cabin she’d slept in on the last trip. She washed her long, gray hair and dried it, then sat down to supper of meat and vegetables with the men. They treated her like royalty.

Somehow, the place felt like home.

P.C. was gone for good, and Emma was changing. Her children noticed that she was happier than they’d ever seen her. She had time to read more, time to garden, time to walk to visit friends, the freedom to travel.

“I am more than glad to be free of it all,” she wrote in her diary. “Have been happy ever since.”

Nelson graduated high school in 1941. The only social activity on Barkers Ridge was at the Baptist church, where they had fire-and-brimstone revivals in the summer. The boys, Nelson and Robert, would go to the revivals to try to convince pretty girls to let the boys walk them home. One night, Robert, in his early twenties, was sitting beside a girl and his whispers got a little loud.

A few days later, he and Nelson were on the farm, playing croquet shirtless and barefoot in the side yard, when a sheriff’s deputy pulled up. He stepped out of the car and approached the boys and said he had a warrant from Robert’s arrest. He said Robert had been disturbing the peace in church.

The boys stood there, white-faced, before Robert spoke up.

Well, let me go in the house and put on some clothes,
he said. The deputy nodded and Robert walked inside.

Nelson talked to the deputy a while and collected the croquet set and put it in the garage, which had cracks between the wall slats. On his second trip in, he peered through the slats and saw Robert running down over the hill. He’d climbed out the back window.

Nelson didn’t say anything to the deputy. They stood around a few more minutes.

It’s taking him an awfully long time to put some clothes on,
the deputy said.
Go on in there and check and see when he’s going to be ready.

Nelson followed his orders. He spent about five minutes inside and came back out.

Well, I went to every room in the house, and I can’t find him,
Nelson said.
Don’t know where he is.

Around midnight, Robert came back to the house.

Can I borrow your bike?
he asked his younger brother.
I’m going to ride it to Monroe’s.

He left the bike in Gallipolis, at least thirty miles away. The next thing anybody heard, Robert was a soldier in the US Army.

Nelson went to work on a dairy farm in Mechanicsville, Ohio— labor so hard you could’ve wrung sweat out of his belt. When he turned eighteen, on December 28, 1941, he took a job with the telephone company and worked there a year before he, too, signed up for war. They put him on a train in Dayton, to Cincinnati, on to Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana, where he got shots and a haircut and even pulled KP duty before the sun had set on his first day as a soldier.

Before the war was over, Robert would be shot down over Munich and spend a year and a half in a German prisoner of war camp. People would whisper about how gaunt and pale he was when he came back to Ohio, a hero. Nelson, a paratrooper, would take a
bullet to the thigh on Corregidor Island in the Philippines, recover, and get set to jump again when the war was called off.

“They were tough, that family,” their cousin, Tommy Jones, would say years later. “Every last one of them.”

As soon as Emma could, she sold the farm on Barkers Ridge and in 1944 moved back to Ohio, to Chesapeake, just across the river from Huntington, West Virginia. Louise went off to Marshall College while Lucy, the youngest, finished high school. Emma enrolled her in business school at Bliss College in Columbus, then bought a house in Rutland, Ohio, north of Gallipolis, on the Appalachian Plateau.

With nothing tying her down, Emma began to relocate frequently. She went to Pittsburgh and worked nine weeks, came back to Rutland to rent the house, then went to Dayton to work in a private boarding school for three months. In 1945, she moved back to Rutland and began renovating the home. She changed the cellar stairs, cut a doorway, installed banisters on the front porch, tore down an old fence, chopped down trees, demolished an old barn, and built a rock garden. Between projects she read and wrote poetry about nature, about God, about men, about tugboat landings and swimming holes and naughty birds and her new stage in life.

My home I scrubbed and painted,

Until I nearly fainted,

Just for the lack of pelf,

All by myself.

She self-published a collection that she distributed with great humility to friends and members of her family.

In 1949, Louise had a baby, Barbara, and needed help, so Emma moved back to Gallipolis. The next year, Emma and Louise bought a house together at 556 Fourth Avenue. They got along well. Emma
read the newspaper every day and paid attention to local politics, often opining on the news—with sharp wit—in letters to the editor. On June 12, 1951, she sent this:

Dear Editor: I was going to write and get in my three cents worth of opinion about how negligent the school board has been about making more room in our overfull schools, but decided not to disturb them in their lethargy.

Instead I will give my version of what goes on with the peas in our gardens after they come up. I only have to say the rabbits ate my peas to get an argument started. Most everyone around here that has tried to raise peas say “the birds ate them off.”

My peas have vanished in the past quite a few times. One time when they were being eaten I put a chicken wire fence around the rows, and they were not bothered again. Anyone should know a fence will not keep out the birds. Another time when the peas were three or four inches tall they were eaten off clean, half way of the rows in a day or two. There happened to be a family of rabbits living in my garden at the time. Last year there were two rabbits lived in and around my garden and the peas were eaten. This year our garden is back of the athletic field fence and the holes were stopped to keep out the rabbits, which lived just on the other side. One could see them each morning out getting their breakfast, but the peas were not bothered.