Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (8 page)

The rise of the car in the 1950s was accompanied by the rise of television. At the beginning of the decade, only 9 percent of American households had a TV set. More than half had one by 1954, and 86 percent would own one by the end of the decade. Americans began to experience life not by the soles of their feet, but by the seat of their pants.

And along came a startling discovery. In March 1955, two months before Emma set out, a convention of family doctors assembled in Los Angeles to talk about a new generation of surprisingly
lethargic children. Two emissaries from the athletic world broke the news: American young people are forgetting how to walk.

So said University of California football coach Lynn “Pappy” Waldorf and US Olympic trainer Eddie Wojecki in the keynote address to the seventh annual assembly of the American Academy of General Practice. Children, the men testified, would rather jump into a car to go a block than walk. And shockingly, the trend had already produced conspicuous changes in the physiques of kids.

The men both spoke of the sudden need to strengthen rather than loosen the muscles of athletes. They ascribed the change to a severe decrease in walking brought about by the habitual use of cars. And they pointed to a simultaneous decline in hiking.

America, it seemed, was at a turning point. When given a choice, Americans preferred to grab the car keys. Streets and cities were being designed for the automobile, rather than the pedestrian. This should have come as no surprise.

Henry David Thoreau predicted as much ninety-three years before Emma’s journey, in June 1862, when
Atlantic Monthly
published one of Thoreau’s essays, called “Walking.”

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only, when fences shall be multiplied, and mantraps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days are upon us.

Anthropologists estimate that early man walked twenty miles a day. Mental and physical benefits have been attributed to walking as far back as ancient times. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder (23–79
AD
) described walking as one of the “Medicines of the Will.” Hippocrates, the Greek physician, called walking “man’s best medicine” and prescribed walks to treat emotional problems, hallucinations, and digestive disorders. Aristotle lectured while strolling. Through the centuries, the best thinkers, writers, and poets have preached the virtues of walking. Leonardo da Vinci designed elevated streets to protect walkers from cart traffic. Johann Sebastian Bach once walked two hundred miles to hear a master play the organ.

William Wordsworth was said to have walked 180,000 miles in his lifetime. Charles Dickens captured the ecstasy of near-madness and insomnia in the essay “Night Walks” and once said, “The sum of the whole is this: Walk and be happy; Walk and be healthy.” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of “the great fellowship of the Open Road” and the “brief but priceless meetings which only trampers know.” Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche said, “Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.”

More recently, writers who knew the benefits of striking out excoriated the apathetic public, over and over again, for its laziness.

“Of course, people still walk,” wrote a journalist in
Saturday Night
magazine in 1912. “That is, they shuffle along on their own pins from the door to the street car or taxi-cab…. But real walking … is as extinct as the dodo.”

“They say they haven’t time to walk—and wait fifteen minutes for a bus to carry them an eighth of a mile,” wrote Edmund Lester Pearson in 1925. “They pretend that they are rushed, very busy, very energetic; the fact is, they are lazy. A few quaint persons—boys chiefly—ride bicycles.”

“But to dyed-in-the-wool walk-lovers the car has proved a calamity … because unless we be strong as steel, our lazy and baser
natures yield to the temptation of time-saving when a ride is offered us,” wrote Mary Magennis in 1931.

Thoreau’s “evil days” had arrived, and the country, keys in hand, was making a dramatic move from feet to tires. The resulting death toll was astounding. By 1934, as the road-building programs gained steam, it was expected that two thousand pedestrians would be killed and eight thousand more injured. Fifteen years later, those numbers had skyrocketed. Cars were killing nearly thirty people a day and injuring seven hundred. A journalist for the
Saturday Evening Post
called it “a feud” between man and automobile. The pedestrian, he wrote, “literally would be safer on a lion-infested African veldt or in man-eating tiger territory than he is crossing a downtown street at dusk.”

And at that moment, among the confluence of mechanical engineering and highway building, the Appalachian Trail—the People’s Path—was fully blazed and opened to the public. You could set out for a day or a week or a month and lose yourself in the wilderness.

A man named Harold Allen summarized its appeal:

Remote for detachment,

narrow for chosen company,

winding for leisure,

lonely for contemplation,

the Trail leads not merely north and south

but upward to the body, mind and soul of man.

In 1948, Earl V. Shaffer became the first person to hike its entirety in a single trip, the first thru-hiker, and when he was finished, he wrote: “Already it seemed like a vivid dream, through sunshine, shadow, and rain—Already I knew that many times I would want to be back again—On the cloud-high hills where the whole world lies below and far away—By the wind-worn cairn where admiring eyes first welcome newborn day—To walk once more
where the white clouds sail, far from the city clutter—And drink a toast to the Long High Trail in clear, cold mountain water.”

She came down out of Carver’s Gap, near Tennessee’s Roan Mountain, on June 4, and she was having no luck finding a place to stay. It seemed the bigger the house, the less likely she would be welcome. One woman was terribly snooty and acted as though she was insulted that Emma had even come to her door. Tired of searching for charity, she checked into a motel on the highway. She washed her hair and some clothes, took a welcome shower, and got a good night’s sleep on a soft bed.

The next day’s hike was nearly all on paved road and she grew tired quickly. When she could go no farther, she stopped at a little house to ask if she could rest a while on the porch. The man who answered thought she was a government agent who had come to spy on them. He stayed inside with the door latched and asked her all sorts of crazy questions through the screen. She tried to explain who she was and what she was doing, but the man was still suspicious. He asked her if she was with the FBI. When she realized she was making no progress, she stepped off the porch and walked on and finally found a family with seven sons, all at home, who let her stay the night.

She left at a quarter to six the next morning and followed the trail up an Appalachian gorge carved out by the swift waters of Laurel Fork. At the end of the gorge, past eastern hemlocks and sycamore trees, she found a majestic waterfall, the most beautiful she’d ever seen, cascading over moss-covered stone.

She pressed on toward Hampton, Tennessee, but she’d run out of water by the time she reached Watauga Dam, the second tallest of all the Tennessee Valley Authority dams. She asked a man there,
standing in front of the sixty-four-hundred-acre lake, for drinking water, but he said there was none around. Emma didn’t seem to mind, though. “A very nice looking man he was, too,” she wrote in her notebook when she stopped to drink from a spring. She slept that night atop the mountain, and the wild dogs came back, so she built a fire for protection. She stayed awake most of the night, worrying about whether it would rain.

On June 8, a storm moved over the mountains and brought with it rain and sleet and intense cold. Emma put on most of the clothes she had, including three coats, and walked as quickly as she could,
but she couldn’t get warm. The trail was lousy with nettles and brush and the hike was miserable, but she finally crossed the state line, into Virginia, and into the little town of Damascus. It was a place that would become known as Trail Town, USA, in part due to its kindness to A.T. hikers, but on that day, when she needed shelter most, she was turned away from a motel. Soaked as she was, they wouldn’t keep her. She walked three more blocks and found a cabin for rent, and it was fine. She had privacy, anyway, and she wouldn’t be a bother to anyone. She washed some of her clothes and that night, celebrating the fact that she crossed another state line, her third so far, she sat down and treated herself to a delicious supper of steak.

JUNE 9–22, 1955

She couldn’t keep a secret forever.

She had hiked through Jefferson National Forest, then through a long stretch where the trail was torn up from manganese mining, then, nearing Groseclose, Virginia, she found a section flush with peach trees and apple trees and ate her fill, sweet juice on her lips. She had been turned away again at a snooty motel, and had seen a large black-and-yellow butterfly near Goldbond, Virginia, and had found a big white goose feather at the very top of Sinking Creek Mountain. She had stayed the night with Mr. and Mrs. Ed Pugh, and Mr. and Mrs. Hash Burton, and Mr. Lou Oliver, and Mr. and Mrs. Taylor of Pine Ridge, and Dr. and Mrs. Harry Semones, who enjoyed her stories about the trail so much that they kept her up past bedtime.

So it was that on the afternoon of June 20, a Sunday, Emma met a man at a gas station and let slip what she was doing, where she was going. The next day, as she approached Black Horse Gap, she sat down a few yards away from the road, on the edge of the forest, to eat a snack. A car stopped in front of her and the driver pulled onto the shoulder. Two men climbed out, well dressed, and walked toward her. The first introduced himself as Preston Leech, a photographer from Roanoke, Virginia, and the second said he was Frank E. Callahan. They were both trail club members who had
heard about her journey and spent the afternoon trying to track her down. They were overjoyed to finally find her.

They told her they wanted to tell her story, that what she was doing was simply amazing. The exposure would be great for the trail, and people around there would love it.

She wasn’t sure. She still hadn’t sent word home to her family. Besides, someone might read about her and get the idea to harm her, or take advantage of an old lady. She told them no, that she wouldn’t cooperate, but they didn’t let up. They convinced her to stay the night at Callahan’s cabin near the trail. They took her pack and loaded it into the car, as insurance, and she set off to hike the final ten miles over the mountains to Bear Wallow Gap, where they picked her up and drove her to the cabin. The game warden, J. W. Luck, joined them for dinner, which Callahan spooned from tin cans onto plates.