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

by Montgomery, Ben

  Emma Gatewood knew none of this. Her world was insular, the trees and flowers and animals and elements. She drifted to sleep that night in a lean-to beside the trail.

  The boys came, three of them, around midnight to camp at the shelter, and when they discovered an old woman inside, they turned to leave. Emma invited them back, told them there was plenty of room and she didn’t mind at all to share the space. She left them sleeping the next morning and made good time across the state line into Pennsylvania, nearing Caledonia State Park, in a valley between Blue Mountain and South Mountain, land once owned by Thaddeus Stevens. She’d be in Pennsylvania for another 230 miles. She washed out some clothes and dried them by a fire and slept some before setting off again.

  She was climbing up the steep south bank of Chinquapin Hill when she heard something unnatural. She swung around and caught sight of a man who was huffing and puffing up the slope behind her. His hair fell in his eyes and he was having a hard time with the climb, but it seemed he wanted to catch up. Figuring he was a reporter, she stopped.

  The man introduced himself as Warren Large. He was a birdwatcher, and he’d read about her in the newspaper and set out that morning to try to find her. He said that he wouldn’t take too much of her time, he just wanted to ask a few questions. Two or three, he said. The two sat on a log in the Pennsylvania woods and started talking. Two hours later, he said he’d better go. He got up and bid Emma good-bye and lots of luck. Then he sat back down and they went on talking another hour. On July 10, 1955, Warren Large missed church and Sunday school and Emma Gatewood called it a day.

  She got a nice bunch of lettuce from Mrs. Meisenhalter in Michaux and some provisions in Pine Grove Furnace, finally arriving at the halfway point on the trail, a place named for its charcoal-fired blast furnace where firearms were made for the American Revolution. She was talking to the leader of a Boy Scout pack from Ohio when the forest warden called her to the telephone. It was the state park superintendent. He wanted to arrange an appointment with Conway Robinson, a radio and newspaper reporter from Baltimore. News had finally hit the big cities. Robinson wanted to meet Emma in Brantsville, Pennsylvania, so the next morning she started early, before 6:00 AM, but she got lost on a side trail. By the time she found her way, it was inching into afternoon and she still had miles to go. The section was particularly rocky, and everywhere she turned there were more rocks. It was 5:00 PM by the time she arrived in Brantsville. Robinson had been waiting all afternoon, but he took her back to the woods before sundown and shot photographs and film of her walking around. When he had enough, he recorded her voice. As a way of saying thanks, Robinson treated her to supper that evening.

  She walked across the Pacific Coast Highway and into the sand and across the beach of an ocean she had never before seen. She wore Sunday shoes and a long-sleeved linen dress and a straw sun hat with a white flower affixed to the side. The California wind blew the saltwater and sand against her skin. A group of boys in full-length bathing suits splashed in the surf. The year was 1937.

  She stared at the ocean and beheld its simple beauty. So far from home, she wondered about her daughters.

  She had slipped away to come west, a journey most of her family had made years before. Her mother and a brother were in California, and a sister had a place in Santa Ana—and an extra bed. She had relayed that it would be no bother to have a houseguest until things settled down in Gallia County. Emma enjoyed catching up, and her mother offered warm sympathies for her struggles back home. But the sadness of leaving her children had left Emma heartbroken. She couldn’t have afforded to make it here with them, and she knew that P.C. wouldn’t treat them like he had treated her. She’d moved to California once before, bringing Louise, an infant, after a brutal beating, but it was temporary. She stayed for nearly a year, then moved back to Ohio when P.C. promised things would change. This time was different. She wasn’t sure she’d ever go back.

  First sight of ocean, between Seal and Huntington Beaches, 1926. Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds

  Emma felt pangs of guilt for leaving her children. But what choice did she have? P.C. had violated her for the last time, and if she wasn’t strong enough to keep him away, her only option was to leave, to head west.

  On November 18, 1937, she wrote to her daughters and tucked the two-page letter into an envelope with no return address.

  Dear Louise and Lucy:

  I have wanted to write to you all the time but did not want your dad to know where I was. He is the worst nightmare I ever heard of. I wish to the great I am he would leave me alone. I do not want him around and he just might as well give up. Yesterday he wired me a large bunch of mums and not wanting to look at them I immediately took them to the cemetery and put them on Father’s and Myrta’s graves. I will bet you could use a new dress, shoes, or coat. I can not possibly ever think of coming back while he is there and there is not any use for him to keep pestering me. I try not to think of you and all the things I could and would love to do for you. Will just live in hopes things will change so that I can be with you sometime. You be patient and good so that you will not cause so much misery as your dad has. I would still be with you if he had just kept his hand to himself in spite of all the ugly things he said to me. But that is all past now. It is just too bad and too late. If he bothers me anymore I will go to some foreign country and I will bet he will not bother me. I hope I will never see his old face again. I have suffered enough at his hands to last me for the next hundred years.

  Living in hopes I can be with you again sometime, I am yours with tons of love,

  Mama

  The girls read the letter at home in Gallia County. They were eleven and nine and old enough to understand the pain packed into it. They had been their father’s tools, too, writing at his command about how much they missed her and how much they wanted to see her and how she should, please, come home. They knew, even then, that they were part of a charade, but they cooperated. And the letters continued.

  The road was flat and barren, a two-lane ribbon of asphalt that unspooled before her, and she thought it would never end. Her feet were sore. All day she was on the highway, and she hiked over the new Pennsylvania Turnpike, America’s first toll road, which extended east to the Delaware River and west to her home state of Ohio. She saw a house around 5:30 that evening, and without even asking, she walked up and plopped down on the front porch. The people inside, the McAllister family, looked through the windows at the scruffy stranger. She got the impression that they thought she was batty, and she wasn’t about to correct them. She was too tired. They finally asked her who she was and Emma told them what she was doing. They warmed up a bit and invited her to supper, and once they had eaten, the McAllisters asked if she wanted to stay the night.

  The next day the hike took her over sharp, jagged rocks all morning, remnants of the glaciers of the last ice age that scraped them south before retreating. The section was the rockiest on the trail, and each stone seemed to be purposefully placed on edge. She desperately needed new shoes. She had sliced the sides of the pair she was wearing to make them more comfortable, to give her bunions room to breathe, but her feet were swelling from all the walking.

  A little after 11:00, she arrived on the outskirts of Duncannon, Pennsylvania. She was wearing Bermuda shorts and she was already in town by the time she thought about changing into her dungarees. A cluster of children were playing on their front porch and, upon seeing her coming up the road, one little boy hollered.

  “Look!” he told his playmates. “There goes a lady tramp!”

  Emma kept walking. It wasn’t the first or last time she’d been pointed out in derision, and she didn’t let it stop her. A few minutes later, the lady tramp crossed the mighty Susquehanna River and popped into a little restaurant at the end of the bridge. She ordered a tomato sandwich and chased it with a banana split to lift her spirits.

  After her dinner, she went in search of water. By 9:00 PM, she still hadn’t found any. She fished her flash
light from her sack and stood beside the road, waving the light in hopes a car would stop. When one finally did, it held two women and their children. Emma told them she was looking for a place to stay—or some water at least. She piled in and they drove fifteen miles before the woman pulled up to a house where Emma spent the night. The homeowner drove her back to the trail the next morning.

  Besides the throbbing in her feet, the hike through eastern Pennsylvania, about one hundred miles west of Philadelphia then, was easy. The difficulty was finding a place to stay. She walked fifteen miles on July 15 before she approached a large house to ask if they had extra room. She could see a woman inside doing housework, but when the woman came to the door she claimed she had arthritis and wouldn’t invite Emma in. At the next house she came to, the homeowner said he didn’t have any extra beds or room. She tried eight houses in a row and was turned away at each one.

  The next house she came to was little bitty, and a buxom blonde answered the door. The woman said she didn’t have an extra bed, but she sent the children to an outbuilding, where they prepared a cot for Emma. She told them she preferred the front porch swing, if that was OK, and she fell asleep there that hot summer night as the woman washed her clothes in a machine.

  8

  ATTENTION

  JULY 16–26, 1955

  The sharp rocks were killing her feet, each step a new jolt of pain. Emma didn’t wear the hard-soled boots of a seasoned outdoorsman but rubber-soled sneakers that quickly wore out. In an emergency, she had taped the discarded rubber heel from a man’s shoe to the bottom of her instep for more arch support. Her footwear was more akin to the moccasins worn by Daniel Boone, who was born in the vicinity and used to hunt and fish in these hills as a boy.

  Happy to let her feet heal, she spent the night at the Hertlein Campsite and made it into the narrow little town of Port Clinton, Pennsylvania, the next afternoon. She poked into a store to see about getting a new pair of shoes. The place was a wreck, the worst disorder she’d ever seen. Boxes were piled high and there was a layer of dust on everything she touched. She bought a few snacks and sat on the porch out front for a bit before heading down the street to see about a room at the King Fish Hotel. Just then, a woman in a nearby house hollered.

  Are you the woman who is walking the trail? she asked.

  I am, said Emma.

  The woman, Mrs. Swayberger, was very excited, and that made Emma happy. The woman told her son to stand next to Emma for a photograph, and the woman’s daughter insisted Emma follow her around the corner to meet her husband, who was interested in the trail.

  She had again been recognized. Word about her hike was spreading like prairie fire. The Associated Press dispatch from Boonsboro, Maryland, had made it all the way to Gallia County, in fact, and the newspaper ran a follow-up story on the local woman who was getting national attention.

  Her exact whereabouts since she left here early in April to “go south” were not known until Friday afternoon when word came from Boonsboro, Md., of her progress along the trail which winds from Mt. Oglethorpe, Ga., through 14 states, eight national forests and two national parks, to its northern terminus atop Mt. Katahdin, Maine, some 5,200 feet above sea level.

  The reporter interviewed Monroe, Emma’s oldest son, who was the wire chief for Ohio Bell Telephone Company in Gallia County. Monroe seemed surprised, but not worried.

  “We did not know for sure what she was doing until just yesterday, although we were beginning to have our suspicions,” he said. “Mother is a great lover of the outdoors, enjoys perfect health, and can outwalk most persons many years younger.”

  On a stretch of the A.T. through Berks County, Pennsylvania, Emma bumped into a group of Boy Scouts from the Shikellamy Scout Reservation, who promptly reported back to a columnist at the Reading Eagle. Emma had told the boys that she’d so far detoured for three copperheads and two rattlesnakes, and that she’d slept outdoors on a handful of freezing nights. The boys were mystified that she was wearing tennis shoes, the columnist reported. “She was wearing sneakers, and supposedly expert counsel on hiking comfort advises the wearing of stout shoes of good weight—not too heavy but tough enough to stand hard wear,” the columnist wrote. “When you’re a 67-year-old woman on a 2,050-mile hike, though, maybe there isn’t another person in the world who qualifies as an expert on how to take care of your own feet.”

  News of her walk had even reached a young writer at a fledgling magazine called Sports Illustrated in New York City. Reporter Mary Snow began to wonder whether the eccentric grandmother on the Appalachian Trail might make for a good profile. The newspaper stories had addressed the Who, What, Where, When, and How, but no reporter had touched on the most important, intriguing question: Why? Snow would. But first things first: how do you track down someone in the wilderness who is hiking at a clip of fourteen miles a day?

  Meanwhile, Emma had her own problems, besides her swollen feet. She had left Port Clinton, Pennsylvania, after a good night’s rest, enjoyed a lovely walk the next afternoon, bunked in a cabin at Blue Mountain for a dollar, then headed for Palmerton, Pennsylvania, on the morning of July 19. She tried to rent a hotel room, but the folks there wouldn’t let her stay. She wondered what she must look like. She had found a faucet that morning and washed her face, but without a comb she had no way to brush the knots out of her iron-gray hair. She had sifted through a campfire and found a fork, which she used as a comb. Now, though, she was leaving yet another hotel, exhausted and wondering where she should go for the night.

  She was walking down the road’s shoulder when a car pulled up beside her in the dusk. Driving was a young woman from the hotel who appeared burdened by her conscience. She asked Emma to climb in, saying she wanted to take her into Palmerton proper. A few minutes later they pulled up at a hotel and Emma got a room for the night for two dollars. She soaked her feet in a bath and walked down the street to Sally’s Restaurant for a sandwich. Someone there told her she needed to meet Ralph Leh and the waitress, Sally, got him on the phone.

  Leh, bespectacled and seventy, was retired from New Jersey Zinc Co., and he was quite the hiker himself. Besides climbing Mount Washington, he had spent the spring before helping clear the Appalachian Trail to Devil’s Pulpit on the Lehigh Gap. He knew that section of the trail like the back of his hand.

  Leh invited Emma to stay at his house, so she fetched her bag from the hotel and showed up on his front porch. The two talked into the night, forming a bond that would last for years. Leh called up the newspaper in Allentown and two journalists came for yet another interview. The reporter asked her what surprised her most about the hike.

  “All the publicity the newspapers give me,” she said.

  The next morning, Leh drove her across town to a store called Grant’s, which wasn’t yet open for the day. Once Leh explained who his company was, the clerk obliged and invited them in, pleased to accommodate. Emma scanned the aisle for a pair of women’s shoes that would fit, but the largest size was much too small. Her feet had swollen out of women’s shoes. She slipped into a comfortable pair of men’s shoes, size 8½, which gave her a little room should her feet continue to expand. She bought the shoes, two pairs of wool and nylon socks, and some wire hairpins. The clerk, out of kindness, gave her three five-cent packages of Life Savers and wished her lots of luck.

  Leh drove Emma back to Lehigh Gap, where she had left the trail, and the two climbed the cliff to the top. Leh thought Emma might need help getting up the steep embankment, but he was surprised to see her scale the wall, lugging her bag and maple walking stick, without help.

  He bid her good-bye from below and, again, she was alone.

  Emma wrote to her daughters again on February 20, 1938, from her sister Lucy’s house in Santa Ana, California, where she had found a job working as a practical nurse. She was burdened deeply by her decision to leave her family and peeved by the repeated attempts from her husband to lure her home. Nevertheless, she was considering returning, even then.

&
nbsp; Dear Louise and Lucy:

  It is dear of you to write to me and send the nice candy and valentines. I like the pictures you draw and am so glad you are getting along so nicely in school. I hope I can be with you sometime and do all the nice little things I would love to do…. I have a lovely place to stay and there is loads of lovely flowers of all kinds. I would tell you more only your dad would write to the man in the mountains with lots of flowers and such and such a house etc. etc. like he did when I was at Orange. I have Sunday off and spend it here with Mother. It is quite a little drive but it is nice to be with Mother. Don’t you think it would be nice to be with your mother? I picked some oranges and made some fruit salad for dinner or lunch as the city folks say…. My side hurts pretty badly sometimes. Some nights I can hardly get to sleep for the pain. I want to have it seen to as soon as I can. It should make your Dad feel good to know he did it, throwing me down in the floor. My breast is still blue where he jumped on me, but the lump is gone. I go to bed now and everything is just as peaceful and quiet as can be. Hoping you are fine and be nice girls so I can be proud of you.

  With loads of love,