Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (4 page)

This time would be different. She had learned hard lessons.

She had been on the trail eight days when she caught a ride, from a man and woman named Jarrett who were picking up fertilizer near where a truck had spilled its load. They allowed her to stay the night at their home and drove her back to the trail the next morning, to the same spot from which she’d left, and sent her packing with a mess of corn pone. She walked twenty miles that day, finally reaching Hightower Gap as a spring thunderstorm moved
in. She made her bed on some boards under a cement picnic table, but she rolled back and forth all night, trying helplessly to stay out of the rain.

She set off the next morning and at long last, on May 14, she crossed the state line and left Georgia behind. She started up the first mountain in North Carolina and the sun beat down upon her neck. She was tired. She raked together a bed of leaves and settled in for a nap; when she woke, she felt a little like Rip Van Winkle.

That afternoon, as another storm approached, she heard a cowbell clanking in the forest and a man calling hogs in the distance. She thought there might be a place to stay nearby, but when she walked down into the gap she didn’t see a soul. No homes. No hogs.

She was walking through a part of the world that was full of secrecy and distrustful of outsiders, the broad and beautiful setting for a never-ending game of cat-and-mouse between the people of the hills and the government stiffs. In these secluded hills, a man could scrape out only a meager living through lawful ways. If he wanted to get ahead, he needed more than a few hogs and a rocky plot of corn. The mountains were both a curse and a blessing, though, and the thick woods, tall peaks, and skinny valleys provided natural coverage for an assortment of clandestine entrepreneurialism. Chief among them was moonshining. It started with the water, pure and cold, which bubbled up endlessly out of limestone springs. It was aided by the blue haze that hung low and camouflaged the hickory smoke from the fires that cooked the mash. So out flowed secret streams of illegal moonshine, 100-proof white lightning, in the trunks of jalopies destined for the big cities of the Midwest— Detroit, Chicago, and Indianapolis. The local lawmen tended to look the other way. Cutting stills was impolitic. The state, however, saw opportunity—specifically the opportunity to tax and tax often. And if it couldn’t tax, it could handcuff—and thus raged a battle that occasionally sent bullets whizzing through these hollers.

Emma was a teetotaler. She didn’t even drink coffee, and she took great pride in that fact, making a point to turn it down outright, a hidden lecture buried in her refusal. But she knew of the battles that had seized the region and she tried to be careful as she plodded through.

She was startled when a man stepped from behind a tree.

Are there any houses around here?
she asked.

Not around here,
he said.

The man introduced himself as Mr. Parker, and another man walked up to them, Mr. Burch. They told her they had been checking on their hogs, which roamed free in the woods, each wearing a cowbell, and they were camping at a lean-to a few miles away. If she could walk there, she was welcome to stay, they said.

They seemed nice enough. She agreed, and Mr. Burch took her pack and carried it toward the shelter. When they arrived, another man, Mr. Enloe, joined them. They gave Emma straw for a bed and let her dry her wet clothes by their fire.

In the morning, two of the men left after breakfast and said they’d return by dinner, leaving Emma alone with Mr. Burch. She had decided to take the day off to give her aching legs time to recover. They asked her to make cakes out of the stewed potatoes left over from breakfast, so she mixed the potatoes with flour and eggs and fried the loose patties in a skillet over the fire. She’d come to the trail for solidarity with nature, for peace, and here she was, doing chores for a group of men.

That afternoon, the forest warden and game warden stumbled upon Emma and Mr. Burch. They though Emma was Burch’s wife. She was embarrassed, but didn’t correct them. She didn’t want to explain what she was doing out on the trail. She didn’t want to talk about why she was walking, or what she had walked away from.

He found her in the dark.

She was walking home from church in Crown City, Ohio, on a chilly night. He rode up beside her on his horse, Dick. Her cousin, Carrie Trowbridge, knew him from town and introduced them.

P. C. Gatewood was the catch of Gallia County, Ohio. He was slender, with a soft tan complexion and short brown hair. He was a strident Republican, and he came from plutocrats—regional royalty, or at least they presented themselves in that fashion. His family owned a furniture factory in Gallipolis. At twenty-six, he was eight years older than Emma, and he seemed worldly, aristocratic even. He had earned a teaching degree from Ohio Northern University, making him one of a handful in the region with a college diploma, and he taught children to read and write at the one-room school-house nearby.

He asked if she wanted a ride and she accepted. He helped her up onto Dick. She had never ridden behind a man before, and as they galloped down the road she could scarcely stay on the horse. There was no way she was going to put her hands around P.C.’s waist.

He carried her home several times that winter, through the barren trees that cast crooked shadows on the hollows, but she never grew bold enough to slide her hands around his body. That wouldn’t be proper. One night, she fell off—slid right off the back of the animal. P.C. stopped long enough to give her a hand back on.

Winter turned to spring and P.C. began making more advances. Emma hadn’t spent much time thinking about a future with him, but in March he suddenly grew more serious. Out of the blue, he asked her to marry him. For the life of her, she couldn’t understand why he was rushing. He seemed to want to get married right away. She wasn’t ready. She bided her time and put him off for two months.

They’d come from different lives, raised in close proximity but worlds apart. She’d been born in October 1887, in a puny house near Mercerville, a mile from where the creek forked. The house had a barn, a well, and a terrible view of an ugly bluff, but the children played over the hills. There were twelve in all at the time, and their parents shoved them off to the one-room Cofer School when they didn’t have chores at home, which was rarely.

Her father, Hugh Caldwell, was a Civil War veteran, Union tried and true, whose parents had come from Scotland to farm. He was famous for having raised his head above a stone wall in the heat of battle to see where the enemy was. He was wounded later and then lost his bad leg, and after the war he was considered an old reprobate with an affinity for gambling and a taste for whiskey. Her mother, Evelyn Esther Trowbridge, was of British decent, offspring of a clan of Trowbridges who came to America in the 1620s. She was not far removed from Levi Trowbridge, who fought in Capt. Thomas Clark’s Derby Company in the Revolutionary War, and with the Green Mountain Boys under General Ethan Allen.

Emma had lived a dozen lives by eighteen. She still bore the scars from the day her sister, Etta, was heating water to wash in a kettle and a spark jumped out of the fire and caught Emma’s clothes. Her mother applied medicine with a feather. Emma ate fruit from the blackhaw tree and chased her cousin around the barn. When her family moved to Platform, in Lawrence County, near Guyan Creek, her father intended to build a new house. He set the stone but never got around to erecting the rest. They stayed instead in a log cabin, and her father built an extra bedroom on the front porch. The children slept four to a bed, and in the winter the snow on the clapboard roof would blow in on them and they’d shake the covers before it could melt. They peed off the front porch when their parents weren’t looking.

Her mother birthed three more children in that house, making fifteen in all, ten girls and five boys. On hot afternoons, they waded into the creek to get their clothes wet before they took to the fields to hoe corn or plant beans or worm and sucker tobacco or harvest sugar cane and wheat. They’d work until their clothes had dried, then repeat the cycle. Once, when Emma was instructed to plant pumpkins, she grew tired of the monotonous chore and planted handfuls of seeds in each hill. Every plant came up and her little secret was out.

On Sunday mornings, they put on their best clothes and walked a mile to Platform to Sunday school, and after church, the children would climb into the fingers of young trees and ride them to the ground. They hunted wildflowers and climbed all the cliffs they could find, and on one they held firm to a bush and rappelled down its face to peek into a small cave. Once, Emma’s older sisters told her she could catch sparrows at the cattle barn if she threw a little salt on their tails. For hours she worked that Sunday, trying to salt the birds’ tails.

The children would take a jug of water and set it by a bumblebee nest, then punch the nest. The bees flitted out of the nest and went straight into the jug, and the children plunged their hands into the nest for raw honey.

They went to school just four months a year, due to their farm work, and sometimes that dwindled to two. A gander stood guard outside Guyan Valley School, and when he saw the kids coming he’d stretch out his neck and flap his wings and hiss. Occasionally he’d make contact and bring tears.

In 1900, when Emma was thirteen, her father sold the farm and bought another on the Wiseman’s side of Raccoon Creek, a mile above Asbury Methodist Church and a mile below the Wagner post office. They sent the children to Blessing to school, but all were behind in their grades. They tried hard and finally caught up, but the school only went to eighth grade.

When Emma was seventeen, her father fell at work and broke his good leg. Her mother took him to Gallipolis and he was hospitalized for two months. Emma stayed home from school and did the work. She milked the cow before breakfast and did the washing on Saturdays. The boys killed hogs and Emma had to make the sausage, lard, and head cheese. Her mother was surprised that things were in such good order when she returned. Emma had done all the mending, cooking, and cleaning, too.

In 1906, when she was eighteen, she left home for eight weeks to work as a housemaid in Huntington, West Virginia, across the Ohio River. She hated it and came home as soon as she could. That summer, her cousin Carrie Trowbridge asked her to come and stay with Mrs. Pickett, her grandmother, who lived near Sugar Creek. Mrs. Pickett paid Emma seventy-five cents a week and she was responsible for the milking, washing on the board, ironing, cleaning, shelling corn for the chickens, bringing in coal for the cooking, and washing dishes.

Emma, third from left, in front of Blessing School in Green Township, around age seventeen.
Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds

That’s when she met P.C.

There she was, away from home, him asking her to marry and her keeping him at arm’s length. But he’d had enough of this game of hard-to-get. He threatened to leave, to head west and never come back, if she refused to be his wife. She begrudgingly said yes.

She quit school and collected some clothes and went to her aunt Alice Pickett’s house, where Perry was waiting with her uncle, Asa Trowbridge. On May 5, 1907, the two exchanged vows and Emma Caldwell became Mrs. P. C. Gatewood.