Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (34 page)

They still ask.

Wherever Lucy goes, whenever Grandma Gatewood comes up in conversation, people want to know why she did what she did. No surprise there. The question in general has prompted at least one scholarly study, in 2007, called
Why Individuals Hike the Appalachian Trail: A Qualitative Approach to Benefits.
The researchers found that common reasons were the standard fare: being outdoors, hiking, the fun and enjoyment of life, warm relationships, physical challenge, camaraderie, solitude, and survival.

It’s easy enough, I guess, to take Emma’s various responses at face value. Maybe she never thought too long or hard about why she wanted to test herself against nature. Maybe the first time was a lark, as she said, or some primal need to see what was over the next hill, then the next. That might explain the first trip, but then she learned how difficult it was, how painful, how the rosy
National Geographic
article had been wrong.

And she did it again. And again. That’s where my understanding begins to fall short. We could, of course, leave it at her being eccentric, as Bill Bryson wrote, but that’s far too easy an explanation. She did, after all, keep good company on the trail, making friends who were very glad to see her on her return, and not in some sideshow kind of way. She was well read, well spoken, and white-gloves proper. It’s true that she could twitch her gentility slightly to let you know you had done or said something of which she didn’t approve. But to suggest she was eccentric is to suggest it would be strange for her to walk. We know that she couldn’t drive, and that it wasn’t out of the ordinary for her to walk five or ten miles to visit a friend in the course of her daily life. The long hikes were simply an extension of that, a means of getting from point A to point B. Eccentric? No.

Lucy believes that her mother wanted to be the first woman to thru-hike the trail, and that’s worth thinking about. A minor problem with that theory arises when you consider that the story that introduced her to the trail was written in 1949, five years before she set out the first time, in ’54. There’s no indication that Emma saw or read anything about the trail in that span, so how would she have known whether another woman had completed the hike? Maybe Lucy is right in a general sense—but if being the first of her gender was the primary motivating factor, wouldn’t she have made certain that no other woman had gone before her?

I believe Emma Gatewood was honest. I also believe there’s an equal chance that her stock answers were covers. They were
honest—and also incomplete—responses to a question she couldn’t bring herself to fully answer, not when she was a “widow.” Not when she had a secret. Not when she had tasted her own blood, felt her ribs crack, and seen the inside of a jail cell. To suggest she was trying to be the first woman means believing that she was walking toward
something. I’m not sure that’s wholly true. I’m not sure she was walking toward something so much as walking away.

There’s one response among the dozens that I’ve come to think best answers the question, a declarative sentence in the public record that is equal parts truth and defiance. It’s a statement that betrays a secret at the same time. There’s something both bold and hidden in the response. Something beautiful and independent, mysterious and brave. There is escape between the words. Escape from abuse and oppression. Escape from age and obligation. It ends with a period that might as well be a question mark, four words that launch a thousand ships, and it’s an answer that frustrates and satisfies.

“Because,” she told a reporter, “I wanted to.”

Before dawn on the third Saturday of January 2013, I drove Louise Gatewood LaMott from her condominium north of Columbus, Ohio, to Hocking Hills State Park, a few hours southeast. When we arrived, the lots surrounding the park were filling and families began piling out of cars and forming lines beside three or four school buses, which, when filled, ferried them down the hill to the trailhead.

The morning was downright cold, near freezing, and the hikers came prepared. They were bundled head to toe in the best gear— Patagonia, Columbia, the North Face, Eagle Creek, Camelbak. Keys dangled from carabiners and ski poles hung from wrists. They stuffed chemical hand-warmers into their pockets. I watched a middle-aged man and woman sit and strap spiked contraptions on the bottoms of their shoes, like snow chains for hiking boots.

Louise, God love her, was wearing a gray jacket, slacks, and low-top Nike sneakers. “I don’t think I’ll need my gloves,” she said as we climbed out of the rental. She’ll be eighty-seven in two months and as much as I wanted to, I wasn’t going to second-guess her. (“My daughters treat me like a child,” she had told me a few times before, more of a statement to me than an indictment of them.)

When I flew into Columbus, it honestly hadn’t occurred to me that she might want to accompany me to Hocking Hills. I had simply
called to say hello, and see if I might swing by to visit before heading down to the forty-eighth-annual winter hike. But she insisted, and here she stood in the cold, clutching her mother’s skinny stick. Forty years after Grandma Gatewood’s last winter hike, her daughter was not going to miss it.

The other thing I hadn’t expected was the crowd. I’m a fan of state parks, and I visit them often. I’ve seen full campsites at beautiful Big Bend down in southwest Texas and packed freshwater springs on hot Florida afternoons, but I’ve never in my life seen this many people occupy one park at the same time. The scene—minus the camouflage coveralls and checkerboard hunting caps—looked like a rock concert. Thousands had come—young and old, skinny and obese. Cars were packed on the grass in all directions. Walking down a single row, I saw license plates from West Virginia, Illinois, Michigan, Kentucky, and, strangely, New Mexico. I half-expected to find a carnival stand selling funnel cakes.

We stood in the cold for thirty minutes before we could get on one of the buses. When we got to the trailhead,
there was a line.
I can’t emphasize this enough. To get onto the trail near Old Man’s Cave, there was a queue like you’d find at the most popular roller coaster at an amusement park. People were waiting on the buses, then waiting at the trailhead one-hundred-deep …
to take a walk.
To see nature. To descend from level ground down to Old Man’s Cave, to a geographically secretive underground world with these huge
Jurassic
Park-like trees, these gorgeous waterfalls and blackhand sandstone recesses made slowly, particle by particle, over thousands of years.

That morning, I guessed out loud that there were three thousand others walking with us. I’d learn later that 4,305 people showed up to hike six miles. Think about that for a minute.

Many of them wore patches that said G
RANDMA
G
ATEWOOD
H
IKE
. A big boulder was planted at the trailhead, where the clogged
line waited for a bottleneck to clear. A large metal plaque affixed to the rock said:

G
RANDMA
G
ATEWOOD
M
EMORIAL
T
RAIL
T
HIS SIX-MILE TRAIL IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF
G
RANDMA
G
ATEWOOD, A VIBRANT WOMAN, SEASONED HIKER,
AND LONG-TIME HOCKING HILLS ENTHUSIAST.
T
HE PATH BEGINS HERE,
VISITS CEDAR FALLS, AND TERMINATES AT
A
SH
C
AVE.
J
ANUARY
17, 1981

I thought of what Louise had told me about her mother. “When I’m dead and gone,” Emma said, “they’re going to erect monuments to me.” She knew. The Grandma Gatewood Trail has come to be part of the cross-state, twelve-hundred-mile Buckeye Trail, part of the forty-six hundred-mile federal North Country Trail that runs from New York to North Dakota, and part of the American Discovery Trail that covers sixty-eight-hundred miles from Delaware to California.

We slowly and carefully snaked into the gorge, down a series of slopes and worn steps set in stone as trail volunteers sprinkled rock salt at our feet to melt the snow and ice. Even in a crowd, this felt like sacred ground. There was no question why Emma liked this place so much, why she thought it was the most interesting geographical feature she’d seen. Old Man’s Cave is a recess in the side of a cliff, about seventy-five feet above the rushing stream. And it’s big—250 feet long and about 50 feet high.

“You might have to put me on your back,” Louise said.

I was ready to, but she braved the stone steps and icy bridges like a younger woman. I imagined her mother doing the same thing on her final hike, with men reaching out to steady her, to carry her over the rough patches.

Thinking of that scene makes me whimper. We had spoken with a man in line earlier who had participated in this same hike for more
than thirty years. He couldn’t explain what keeps him coming back, but I think I know. I think I know why Louise insisted on coming, and I think I know why I booked a plane ticket on a moment’s notice, just twenty-four hours before. I think I know why all these
people line up by that big plaque on the boulder every year and funnel—baby step-by-baby step—onto the Grandma Gatewood Trail. To be here is to participate in an experience,
her
experience. To walk this path that she loved is to embrace her memory, to come as close to her as possible. To see what she saw and step where she stepped and feel some thin connection to a farm woman who decided one day to take a walk, and then kept going, getting faster until the end. I could be imagining all this, but I lost myself a little. In her footsteps, I forgot my troubles. Maybe the fountain of youth wasn’t a fountain at all.

Louise made it over her mother’s trail just fine. I held her arm through the icy patches, but she didn’t need it. I drove her back to Columbus, and we agreed to do it again next year.

I may not have known about Grandma Gatewood if it weren’t for my mother, Donna Burruss, handing down the stories she inherited. I remember them fondly, dreamy tales of adventure and mystery. Conversations with her siblings, especially Lou Terry, helped immensely.

Thanks to Emma’s surviving children, Louise, Rowena, Nelson, and especially Lucy, who all opened their homes and sacrificed many hours of their time to help me understand their mother as they knew her. They also kindly granted me access to her correspondence, photographs, and journals without asking anything in return. I’m in their debt.

Thanks to Bill Duryea and Kelley Benham for their advice and feedback, and to Michael Kruse, who was always willing to listen. My other generous colleagues at the
Tampa Bay Times
were understanding when I blew deadlines or disappeared because of book work, and they offered tons of unsolicited encouragement and advice. They are Neil Brown, Mike Wilson, Leonora LaPeter Anton, Lane DeGregory, Jeff Klinkenberg, Laura Reiley, Janet Keeler, Eric Deggans, Craig Pittman, and Mary Jane Park. John Capouya, Tom French, Neil Swidey, Michael Brick, Hank Stuever, Chris Jones, Earl Swift, and Matthew Algeo helped me understand what makes a good book, and how to sell it. Speaking of selling it, my agent Jane Dystel held my hand through the entire daunting process.

There’s no finer linear community in America than the folks who know, love, and preserve the Appalachian Trail. I can’t possibly thank all the people who opened their homes to me, gave me rides, or helped me find my way along the trail, but I’d like to thank Laurie Potteiger, Larry Luxenberg, Paul Sannicandro, Robert Croyle, Betsy Bainbridge, Paul Renaud, Gene Espy, Peter Thomson, and Bjorn Kruse. Thanks, too, to a handful of librarians in small towns and cities along the trail who helped track down old stories about Emma’s journey.

Finally, this book would not be possible without my wife, Jennifer, who kept me organized and took care of our family while I chased Emma Gatewood’s ghost across the country. She even climbed Mount Katahdin on an injured ankle to see the journey complete. My children, Asher, Morissey, and Bey, deserve credit as well for asking a thousand times: “Are you done with the book yet, Daddy?”