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

by Montgomery, Ben

  “My feet are sore,” she would write.

  “I did not find any water,” she would write.

  “I kept a fire for company as well as protection,” she would write.

  “When I could not locate the trail after an hour, I was so near out of food,” she would write.

  Occasionally, when she’d slip off the path, the woman who wouldn’t let a passing tramp go hungry back home in Ohio now gladly accepted invitations to rest or eat from the members of the long, linear neighborhood that was slowly, hiker by hiker, getting acquainted with the new Appalachian Trail.

  The trail itself was the product of a dreamer, a man named Benton MacKaye. He said he had been inspired during a six-week hiking trip after graduating from Harvard, when he stood on Vermont’s Stratton Mountain and imagined a ridge-top trail running through wilderness across the entire distance of the range.

  In 1921, when the idea had fermented, some friends convinced him to describe his vision in an article for the Journal of the American Institute of Architects. MacKaye wrote that the purpose of the trail would be to “extend the primeval environment and to set bounds to the metropolitan environment,” providing a grand natural backbone accessible by those packed into cities along the Eastern Seaboard. After the article was published, MacKaye led a concerted effort to involve hiking clubs, lawyers, and others who might help bring his plan to fruition. Hundreds contributed, blazing and mapping sections, searching through property and tax records in county courthouses, angling to cobble together and preserve for the public the longest continuous walking path in the world.

  Ten years later, nearly half the trail had been marked—but mostly in the Northeast, where many trails had long been established and hiking communities had a history. Myron Avery, a young lawyer and early visionary who took the reins, helped organize hiking clubs and plan undeveloped sections. Avery became chairman of the fledgling Appalachian Trail Conference in 1931, and by the group’s meeting in 1937 in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the trail was nearly finished. Avery knew even then, though, that the A.T. would “never be completed.” It would shift and bend and be subjected to endless rerouting and relocation, as if it had a life of its own. The timing of the completion was perfect, and it’s quite possible the trail might not have existed if the plan had been delayed.

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States had just one hundred miles of paved highways. But by the 1930s, cities had begun to spill outward, like a spreading blot, and roads that had been designed for horses and buggies were quickly becoming obsolete. Maybe those early A.T. volunteers felt the need for expediency as their country transformed quickly, as the population grew, as the American automobile industry sped forward at an unprecedented rate.

  The very same year of the trail conservancy meeting in Gatlinburg, in fact, the federal Public Works Administration signed a check for more than $29 million and the federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation bought nearly $41 million in revenue bonds, and 10,000 men began working day and night to move 26 million tons of earth and stone and pour 4.3 million square yards of reinforced concrete to create two steady, even, parallel lanes that ran the length of Pennsylvania—including more than 114 new bridges, with acceleration lanes and paved shoulders—bisecting the state east to west. Popular Mechanics would call the Penn Turnpike “America’s first highway on which full performance of today’s automobiles can be realized.”

  The big road was born.

  It’s ironic, perhaps, but the new expressway’s conceptual father was the same man who thought up the Appalachian Trail: Benton MacKaye. A few years after his article on the “primeval environment” that stretched from north to south, MacKaye, in an article in the New Republic, envisioned a “highway completely free of horses, carriages, pedestrians, town, grade crossings; a highway built for the motorist and kept free from every encroachment, except the filling stations and restaurants necessary for his convenience.”

  Two years later, as the small army of trail blazers and pioneers worked to connect and maintain a footpath through a streak of American wilderness, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was already planning ways to absorb millions of soldiers, soon to engage fully in World War II, back into the nation’s economy once the last bullet had been fired. And he saw a national system of highways that connected the country’s major cities and spliced together rural agriculture centers as a possible solution. Planners immediately started charting a proposal to build or expand nearly forty thousand miles of road. By 1939, when Ford Motor Co.’s “The Road of Tomorrow” and General Motors’ “Highways and Horizons” exhibits opened at the New York World’s Fair, the American public was salivating over high-speed roadways.

  “Since the beginning of civilization, transportation has been the key to man’s progress—his prosperity—his happiness,” said a narrator at the GM exhibit, which was said to feature the new and improved American city of 1960, with tangles of expressways lined with sleek cars and trucks. “With the fast, safely designed highways of 1960 … thrilling scenic feasts of great and beautiful country may now be explored.”

  When Dwight D. Eisenhower took office in 1953, one of his first items of business was to see about building better highways. “Our cities still conform too rigidly to the patterns, customs, and practices of fifty years ago,” he wrote. “Each year we add hundreds of thousands of new automobiles to our vehicular population, but our road systems do not keep pace with the need.”

  Eisenhower thought the American road system was decent but had been designed based on “terrain, existing Indian trails, cattle trails, and arbitrary section lines,” and that it “has never been completely overhauled or planned to satisfy the needs of ten years ahead.” On Eisenhower’s behalf, at a meeting in the Adirondacks of the governors of the forty-eight states, Vice President Richard Nixon despaired over the nearly 40,000 people killed and 1.3 million injured on roads annually, the “billions of hours lost” to traffic jams and detours, and the traffic-related civil suits clogging courts. Then he shocked the room. He called for a $50 billion federal highway program spread over ten years.

  On October 23 of the same year, in Emma Gatewood’s home state of Ohio, the first concrete was poured for a new $336 million cross-state turnpike. The state had acquired fifty-six hundred parcels of land it needed for right-of-way and went to work building a highway divided by a fifty-six-foot depressed median. It would feature paved shoulders, fifteen well-lit traffic interchanges, sixteen service plazas, tollbooths, and an ambulance service. “You really will be able to see where you’re going as the minimum sight distance is 900 feet,” gushed the Columbus Dispatch. “There are no steep hills, because the maximum upgrade is 2 percent and the maximum downgrade 3.2 percent. You won’t have to slow down from maximum speed limits—65 miles an hour for cars and 55 for trucks—when you drive around curves, they’re that gentle.”

  Two years later, the ribbons of road stretched from Pennsylvania in the east to Indiana in the west, over rivers and streams, across swampland and rolling hills. Joined with the Penn Turnpike, the road totaled 611 miles from Philadelphia to Indianapolis. So exciting was the new highway that the people of Ohio began to gather on overpasses to watch the speeding cars wend their way along the smooth pavement.

  The future of America had arrived, and it was riding on a 322-cubic-inch V-8 with an automatic transmission. By 1955, Americans owned sixty-two million vehicles. By June, when Emma Gatewood was a month into her hike, the auto industry was on pace for a banner year behind presidents such as Tex Colbert and Henry Ford II. Chevrolet had set a six-month record, registering 756,317 new cars. The national magazines were filled with color pictures of the new ’56 models, the Studebaker, the Chrysler, the Cadillac, the Buick Dynaflow, with the sweep-ahead styling and the sizzle to match, which “gets going from a standing start like a lark leaving the nest, with not a hint of hesitation between take-hold and take-off.” Every car off the line in Detroit was bigger than the last. Fins grew, and engines added horses. T
he number of two-car families was expected to jump by three million within five years, to a total of 7.5 million, which was attributed to the trend of suburban living. Some sixteen million “one-car wives” remained marooned in the suburbs, but that would soon change. Advertisements for Old Crow bourbon and the Stetson Playboy were surrounded by those for Quaker State Motor Oil and B. F. Goodrich tires.

  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 sa
id 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.

  5

  HOW’D YOU GET IN HERE?

  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.