Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (24 page)

Someone will have to show me a bird eating peas before I will believe. There has been robins, starlings, English sparrows and other sparrows, the tanager, blue bird, doves, blackbirds, gold finches, cat birds, yellow hammers, wood thrush, and
indigo buntings, and not one of them have ever been seen to peek anything but bugs and worms in the garden.

Rabbits will also cut off the rose bushes as with a knife. I will venture to say that there are more rabbits in this town than in the same area in the country around. I do know that I can tramp the hills over and never see one rabbit, but see them here quite often. Build a good fence and raise peas or get rid of the rabbits and raise them.

—Emma Gatewood.

Louise got married in 1951, deeding her part of the house to her mother, and left Emma, for the first time in three decades, alone. All of her eleven children were on their own.

Emma would bounce around the next few years working menial jobs or caring for ailing relatives, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Owensboro, Kentucky, and Miller, Ohio. But after Louise left, in 1951, Emma rented the house and went to work for five months at the county hospital in Columbus, where she likely first saw the
National Geographic
story about the Appalachian Trail, the one that promised the long path had been “planned for the enjoyment of anyone in normal good health” and “doesn’t demand special skill or training to traverse” and gave the following scant advice to those considering a long hike:

Exercise caution over rough or steep parts.

Wear clothing suitable to the latitude, elevation, and time of year.

Plan where to pitch your tent, or find other shelter along the way.

Carry enough food, or know where meals may be had.

For an extended A.T. trip, thorough preparation should be made. The condition of Trail stretches to be traversed should be carefully checked.

Like the five reported thru-hikers before her and the thousands who would follow, she hadn’t been able to get the trail out of her head. In July 1954, she flew to Maine and started south from the summit of Mount Katahdin and got lost and very nearly couldn’t find her way out of the wilderness.

Go home, grandma,
one of the rescuers had told her.

But she was back.

The men told Emma to wait at Rainbow Lake so they could summon a warden to meet her at the west branch of the Penobscot River to ferry her across. She waited around until 9:00
AM
, then headed east past Little Hurd Pond and Pitman Pond, walking about ten miles before noon. When she got to the river, no one was there to meet her. She climbed atop a large rock above the logging road to sit and eat her lunch.

Two thousand miles west, in Denver, Colorado, unbeknownst to most of the American public, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was nearly dead. The former four-pack-a-day smoker, on vacation in Denver, had played a round of golf the day before, then joined his wife and doctor for dinner, where he complained of stomach pains, which became worse as the evening turned to morning. The man whose legacy would be the Interstate Highway System had suffered a heart attack at the age of sixty-four, which would stick him on the eighth floor of Fitzsimmons Army Hospital for seven weeks and keep the nation on edge into the following year.

Back on the Appalachian Trail, the woman who had never had so much as a cold wasn’t on her rock long before she saw dust plumes trailing two cars headed her direction.

The warden climbed out of one. Mary Snow from
Sports Illustrated
and Mrs. Dean Chase from the United Press in nearby Millinocket came out of the other. Emma looked worn out. Her eye was still bruised, but she seemed to be in good spirits. After the greetings, they climbed in the cars and drove a mile or so to a canoe launch. The warden pulled a boat off the top of his vehicle and slid it into the freezing water as the women talked. Mrs. Chase snapped a few photographs as Emma, the warden, and Mary Snow piled into the vessel and started for the other side. The warden had affixed a small motor on the boat and they were across in no time.

Mrs. Chase took the car around and was instructed to meet them at the campground near Katahdin. Emma and Mary Snow stepped ashore, thanked the warden, and began their hike together on a path alongside the Penobscot River. They talked as they walked. So much had happened since they had first met on Bear Mountain. Emma told her about the wind atop Mount Washington, about wading the hurricane-swollen creek with the navy boys, about having to push her sack through the holes in Mahoosuc Notch, about fashioning a discarded piece of rubber into an arch support. She told Snow about using a fork she found at a campsite to comb her hair. She told her about measuring distances between stepping stones in a swift-moving stream with her walking stick because of her broken glasses.

I couldn’t see so good,
Emma said.

Snow asked her where she had been sleeping.

Anywhere I could lay my bones,
Emma said. Front porch swings. Picnic tables. Lean-tos. Logging camps.

What about animals?
Snow asked.

Most people get scared when they come up against an animal,
said Emma,
and right away think they have to make a fight out of it. Animals won’t attack you unless you corner them. Fiddlesticks, I never even saw a bear. I made so much racket crashing and thumping through the woods.

By the time the two arrived at York’s sporting camps, it had begun to rain. Snow asked to use the telephone and called the Katahdin Stream Campground where Mrs. Chase was waiting, and asked Chase to come pick her up at York’s camps. They talked some more while they waited.

Snow wondered about Emma’s general impressions of the trail. Did it meet her expectations?

I read about this trail three years ago in a magazine and the article told about the beautiful trail, how well marked it was, that it was cleared out and that there were shelters at the end of a good day’s hike,
Emma said.
I thought it would be a nice lark. It wasn’t. There were terrible blowdowns, burnt-over areas that were never re-marked, gravel and sand washouts, weeds and brush to your neck, and most of the shelters were blown down, burned down, or so filthy I chose to sleep out of doors. This is no trail. This is a nightmare. For some fool reason they always lead you right up over the biggest rock to the top of the biggest mountain they can find. I’ve seen every fire station between here and Georgia. Why, an Indian would die laughing his head off if he saw those trails. I would never have started this trip if I had known how tough it was, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t quit.

When Mrs. Chase arrived, Emma said good-bye and walked the rest of the way to the Katahdin Stream Campground in the rain. She registered for a cabin. The warden built a fire in the stove for her and brought her a lamp. Mary Snow and Mrs. Chase arrived by car as the evening cold began to set in. The warden brought some extra blankets and the women talked a little more before Snow gave
Emma the balance of her lunch, and Snow and Chase climbed in the car and headed back to civilization in Millinocket.

Emma walked back to the warden’s office and paid him for her cabin. On the walk back, she stopped at the different lean-tos, where fires lit the faces of campers, and chatted, telling her stories to the surprised and curious outdoorsmen. At the base of that mile-high mountain, on the 144th day of her journey, she felt important.

If the trail was a book, she was about to start the last chapter.

SEPTEMBER 25, 2012

We woke in the dark at Katahdin Stream campground. I can’t say woke, really, because it felt like I’d been awake all night, the kind of uncomfortable sleep that never fully sucks you in but instead keeps you right on the edge of consciousness. The pain was in my lower back, mostly, but it wouldn’t be right to complain about spending a single night on the hard slats of a lean-to.

“Most people today are pantywaist,” Emma Gatewood told a reporter five decades ago. I wonder what she’d think of us now. I wonder what she’d think of the gear we’re packing by the light of our headlamps, into ergonomically designed backpacks with what must be hundreds of pockets. Our Leatherman tools and cook-stoves and iPhones with compass apps.

Our goal was to retrace Emma’s steps up Katahdin, using her diary and old trail maps as our guide. I wanted to see what she saw, walk where she walked, in a maddening effort to better understand her by covering the same ground she did fifty-seven years before, to the day, on September 25, 1955. “The end of the trail,” she wrote in her journal.

This was sacred ground.

Five months earlier, I stood on Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia with the same purpose. Like much of the trail, the start has shifted. The southern terminus is now at Springer Mountain—about twenty miles northwest of the more impressive Oglethorpe—where it was moved in 1958 because of development and farming. To try to get some sense of what Emma saw, I had to ignore several
NO
TRESPASSING
signs on the mountaintop and cross private property before beginning a hike downhill. I’d tracked Emma’s footfalls through Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, though the trail has changed so much that it was challenging to know exactly where she had walked. I had climbed the bluffs overlooking Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where she stopped to enjoy the majestic view of the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah. I’d talked at length with her four surviving children—in Florida, Ohio, Arizona, and Arkansas—and her grandchildren, and I’d read her journals and many newspaper and magazine articles as well as a big box of correspondence her family has preserved. I had run my fingers over her old walking stick, a thin but sturdy branch from a wild fruit tree. I thought of climbing Katahdin, the highest point in Maine, as one last sacred pilgrimage, a search for the intangible.

In her book
Wanderlust: A History of Walking,
Rebecca Solnit writes:

A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape, and to follow a route is to accept an interpretation,
or to stalk your predecessors on it as scholars and trackers and pilgrims do. To walk the same way is to reiterate something deep; to move through the same space the same way is a means of becoming the same person, thinking the same thoughts.

The Katahdin ascent is much the same today as it was in 1955, but more than half of the trail in Maine had been relocated. In 1968, after the passage of the National Trails System Act, the Maine Appalachian Trail Club reviewed the entire trail in the state and began to move the A.T. to a route that was more rewarding for the hiker and could be better maintained. Major relocation projects ran from the mid-1970s to the late ’80s.

To be certain our climb was historically accurate, my wife and I hired Paul Sannicandro as a guide. Paul, a good-natured outdoorsman, is the trail supervisor at Baxter State Park, responsible for maintaining some 225 miles of footpath through a two-hundred-thousand-acre wilderness with forty-seven mountain peaks and sixty-seven lakes and ponds. The park was a gift to the people of Maine from former governor Percival Baxter, who bought and donated most of the land over three decades and established a fund, with his own millions, for its maintenance and operation. He wanted the park to remain wild, and despite logging and hunting and thousands of visitors a year, it has maintained for the most part the feeling and spirit of wilderness.

We had met Paul two days before, over Maine lobsters at a dive in Millinocket. He reviewed our itinerary and he checked our packs to be sure we’d brought the appropriate clothing for the cold weather. I was already feeling like a pantywaist.

Using Emma’s journal, Paul had calculated that she would have crossed the West Branch of the Penobscot near Abol Bridge, then walked along the northern bank of the Penobscot a few miles to the
intersection of Nesowadnehunk Stream, then to Katahdin Stream Campground, where she spent the night before a hike up the Hunt Trail, past Thoreau Spring, to Baxter Peak. The next day, we followed her path, putting in about nine easy miles before we reached camp at the base of Katahdin, where we found a plaque implanted into a boulder:

M
AN
IS
BORN TO DIE.
H
IS
WORKS
ARE
SHORT
LIVED.
B
UILDINGS
CRUMBLE,
MONUMENTS
DECAY,
WEALTH
VANISHES.
B
UT
KATAHDIN IN ALL ITS GLORY FOREVER SHALL REMAIN
THE MOUNTAIN OF THE PEOPLE OF MAINE

P.P.B.

The next morning, we filled our canteens with cold water from the stream, finished stuffing our backpacks, and dropped our extra supplies at the ranger station. It was nearly freezing and still dark when we signed the register and left the campground at 5:50
AM,
the same time Emma left, with guide Paul leading the way through the moonlit forest, flanked on both sides by aspens and maples, evergreens and ferns. Six hikers had left before us and many more would follow. I tried to imagine Emma traversing the rough terrain in the dark, her only light coming from a small flashlight. Enough day-hikers come through this stretch now that the path is eight feet wide in places, but in 1955 it wasn’t much more than a game trail.