Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (29 page)

“The Reward of Nature”

If you’ll go with me to the mountains

And sleep on the leaf carpeted floors

And enjoy the bigness of nature

And the beauty of all out-of-doors,

You’ll find your troubles all fading

And feel the Creator was not man

That made lovely mountains and forests

Which only a Supreme Power can.

When we trust in the Power above

And with the realm of nature hold fast,

We will have a jewel of great price

To brighten our lives till the last.

For the love of nature is healing,

If we will only give it a try

And our reward will be forthcoming,

If we go deeper than what meets the eye.

She didn’t reveal her plans for the next big hike, but soon enough everyone would know.

Sitting beside Sunfish Lake, New Jersey, near the Delaware Water Gap, age sixty-nine, 1958.
Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds

1959

The streets of Portland were packed. Traffic was backed up in all directions. There was a maelstrom of cars, horses, dogs, bicycles, and people, some five thousand of them, many with white hair, waiting in the August heat on the little old woman to walk down Sandy Boulevard, through the gold ribbon stretched across the intersection of Eighty-Second Avenue.

A cheer went up when Emma Gatewood came into view. She was flanked by several hundred elderly citizens, some of them clad in pioneer-era clothing, who had hiked the last few miles with her.

The seventy-one-year-old woman looked tired. Spent. Her skin was leathery and tanned to a deep bronze. The soles of her shoes were worn thin. She seemed ready to collapse.

The press had been speculating for days that she wouldn’t make it to her goal. A rumor spread that she had accepted a ride, and this became a sign that she might abandon her walk short of her destination.

G
RANDMA’S
T
RAIL-
W
EARY
, proclaimed the
Miami News.

R
IDE,
R
EST
H
INT
W
ALK
M
IGHT
E
ND
, read the headline in the
Spokane Daily Chronicle.

W
ALKING
G
RANDMA
M
AY
G
IVE
U
P
G
OAL
, shouted the
Toledo Blade.

Indeed, it had been a grueling trip. This wasn’t the Appalachian Trail, with its shade trees and beautiful vistas and cold-water springs. Those were scarce between Independence, Missouri, and Portland, Oregon. In ninety-five days she had walked at three miles per hour on scalding asphalt through Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon carrying a blue umbrella she bought for $1.50 to protect her from the sun. It had survived the entire trip in spite of the passing trucks that tried to rip it from her hands, and it came to be a symbol for guts and determination.

She did her best to stick to the Old Oregon Trail, which was blazed by trappers and traders and pioneers in the early 1800s and
served as the main route for a half million settlers seeking a better life in the West. In Vale, Oregon, she even took time to visit the grave of John D. Henderson, an immigrant who died of thirst, or maybe the black measles, in 1852, in the desert between the Malheur River and Snake River. The story has it that his team died not long into the trip from Independence. Henderson decided to continue on foot, but he couldn’t make it. A blacksmith chiseled his name into stone and pressed on.

The idea to walk the trail had come to her while reading about the Oregon Centennial Exposition. She had spent a chunk of 1958 hiking other pieces of the Appalachian Trail, intending to string together a third two-thousand-mile hike in sections. She had walked from Duncannon, Pennsylvania, to North Adams, Massachusetts. A hike west was indeed a change of scenery.

“I read a piece in the newspapers about that wagon train going to Oregon [in conjunction with the exposition], and I thought of all the women who walked behind the wagons when they went to settle the country,” she told a reporter in Junction City, Kansas. “I was looking for something to do this summer and a walk to Oregon seemed like the best thing.”

She left Independence, Missouri, on May 4, two weeks after former president Harry Truman waved good-bye to the seven-wagon train, and plodded through the plains. She sent a postcard home from Denver, Colorado, on June 3, saying that the snow on the mountains was beautiful and that the governor of Oregon had made her a goodwill ambassador at large and that she was staying with some folks who stopped her on the road. “I am fine,” she wrote. She passed the wagon train a month later, in Pocatello, Idaho, but the journey had been difficult. She slept outdoors in the Wyoming sagebrush on fourteen nights.

The newspapers called her “America’s most celebrated pedestrian” and printed updates along the way, and again people across
the country started pulling for the grandma who wouldn’t stop walking.

“My legs go mechanical-like,” she told one reporter. “When someone stops me, I have to make an effort to get them going again.”

Emma mailed a letter to Lucy in Columbus on July 27, when she arrived in Meacham, Oregon. “Things are getting quite exciting for me,” she wrote.

I went to a rodeo … where there was ten thousand fans and was introduced over the loudspeaker and stood up and waved with the floodlights on me. When I came to a two-lane bridge several hundred feet long across the Snake River, the Highway Patrol held up the traffic one way while I walked across. I felt like Royalty. The Patrol are keeping close watch to see that I do not come to harm. A man from the Centennial Staff met me on the highway and gave me a pass and said I would have a car with chauffeur to use, get all the clothes I needed, have a hotel with all expenses paid, and one day of the Centennial would be proclaimed Emma or Grandma Gatewood day. From what I hear from there, there will be other favors. I am a little excited but not losing any sleep over it. I wish you could be here to enjoy it with me. I have 250 miles to go yet. Folks are doing everything for me. They came to help me have a pleasant trip. Things are very pretty here. After all the treeless country, they surely look good. I will get to Pendleton tomorrow and will soon be going down the Columbia River, which I am told is very beautiful. I was given a dress, shoes, and suitcase at Baker and they have been sent by the Chamber of Commerce on to Portland. I will be getting mail in Portland addressed General Delivery if you want to write. Hoping all is fine there. I am, with love, Mamma.

Large groups in Oregon anticipating her arrival began to gather roadside and cheer her through. Even the trainman on a passing caboose waved and asked her if she wanted a ride.

Her patience was tested when she began to be badgered by people who wanted to take her picture and ask her the same set of questions. The attention had begun to grate, and by the end her emotions were ragged. She told one reporter that she felt like a “sideshow freak.” She began to approach crowds with her head bowed and a handkerchief covering part of her face.

West of Meacham, near La Grande, a bevy of motorists stopped her beside the road, but as they snapped pictures and rattled off a flurry of questions, she simply walked away. Farther west, outside The Dalles, she threw stones at a pesky newsman. Near Hood River, a few days before she got to Portland, a young photographer approached her and squatted to take her picture. She swung her umbrella and struck him on the forehead, leaving a big red welt and drawing blood. In the articles that ran the next day, Emma was called “peppery” and the photographer was quoted saying she “hit like a mule.”

“She let me have it,” the photographer, Robert Hall, told reporters. “But when she saw the blood on my face, she cried and said she felt awful. I told her all was forgotten.”

Someone brought her a lawn chair, a hamburger, and a glass of ice water, and she calmed down. She even hugged Robert Hall. All was forgiven.

Now, on August 7, nearly two thousand miles from where she started, she walked the last short stretch into Portland at a clip that had the Centennial greeters, news reporters, and other well-wishers gasping for breath. The city was buzzing. Portland politicians had declared it Grandma Gatewood Day and boosters had greeted her with flowers at the city line. Police had blocked off a lane of traffic to allow Emma, and the hundreds now walking with her, safe
passage. The traffic jam, according to a reporter for the
Oregonian,
was unprecedented.

When Emma reached the ribbon, she was overcome with tears. She brushed it apart and fell into the arms of a stranger and wept. She seemed shaken by it all, particularly the crowds. She climbed into a police car with Capt. John Pittenger to get away from the crush for a few minutes. When she had regained her composure, she returned to the intersection and got into the back of a red Oldsmobile convertible and, beaming, rode off in a motorcade toward the exposition grounds.

“Who do they think I am?” she asked the mayor of Portland. “Queen Elizabeth?”

She showered and traded in her faded and torn cotton blouse and skirt for a donated dress, an Evelyn Gibson French blue crepe with a pale pink Alençon lace yoke and matching jacket. She donned a blue hat and white gloves and carried a new purse. The outfit was provided for free, as was a lunch of salad, crab cocktail, and well-done roast beef, which she ate with the mayor and police chief. Emma took one shoe off while they ate, but nobody seemed to mind. Her old clothes and the umbrella were taken for an exhibit at the museum of history.

Presents poured in from all corners. She was given the key to Portland. Someone donated a new umbrella. Someone else a watch. She accepted a corsage and gold plaque from the East Broadway Boosters. She got a big basket of fruit from the Hollywood Boosters, then took a ride over the city in a bright yellow helicopter. As she climbed off the helicopter, a woman approached to take her picture and Emma knocked the camera to the ground and immediately felt bad. She apologized dramatically, saying she was still vexed by the great hordes of people who wanted her picture.

The city of Portland put her up at the luxurious Hotel Benson, where she was pampered. Overwhelmed as she was, she seemed
pleased by all the attention. She was invited to Hollywood and hammed it up on Art Linkletter’s
House Party.
She was alternatively the guest of the Oregon Centennial Commission, the Oregon Coast Association, and others who showed her around the state. They drove her to the coast where a group of colorfully dressed Coos Bay Pirates surprised her and presented her with a scarf. She was whisked to Medford, waded in the Pacific at Seaside, piloted a fifty-two-foot Coast Guard rescue boat near Newport, fished for salmon at Gold Beach, and road the mail boat to Agness. Nearly everywhere she went she got a key to the city. A month later, when it was time to leave, the bus company gave her an open ticket, fixed so she could stop anywhere along the line through Seattle, Spokane, Glacier National Park, Winnipeg, Chicago, Detroit, Columbus, and Gallipolis.

She was everyone’s grandma now.

At the end of the year, when the United Press in Oregon put together its list of the biggest news of 1959, it included stories about the Portland newspaper strike, the collision of two jets over Mount Hood, the successful separation of Siamese twins, the discovery of two bodies in the Columbia River, and the kidnapping of the Harrisburg police chief. At number two on the list, just below a story about the combustion of a truck laden with six tons of explosives in downtown Roseburg that killed thirteen citizens and caused ten million dollars in damage, was the Oregon Centennial and the following line: “An Ohio grandmother, Mrs. Emma Gatewood, hiked on foot all the way to Portland.”