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

by Montgomery, Ben

Mama

  The pain in her side was getting worse, and though she was working six days a week, she couldn’t easily afford to see a doctor. In the days after she mailed the letter, she devised a plan. She’d return home to be with her daughters and P.C. would have to pay for her medical care, whatever that might entail.

  The decision would almost kill her.

  The Delaware Water Gap, with its scenic overlooks and rhododendron tunnels and magnificent waterfalls, was just ahead, and she was walking hard to get there before dark. She was coming down out of an upthrust of rocks on Kittatinny Mountain, in a hurry to find a place to stay before night set in, when she slipped.

  The fall wasn’t bad, but she felt a short, sharp pain in her knee. She examined the injury and tested the knee under her full weight. To her relief, the sprain wasn’t severe, but even a minor injury on the trail can be devastating, especially when it’s exacerbated by continuous pounding. Ahead were the toughest, tallest mountains, in New Hampshire and Vermont and Maine, and she’d need to be in top condition. She walked on and found a pool of water and some picnic tables in the dark. Someone had told her there weren’t any houses in the vicinity, so she made her bed on one of the tables and tried to find sleep.

  She didn’t know whether she had made her bed at the local make-out spot or what, but at several times during the night, headlights would swing across the bend as cars pulled into the park. And every time, upon catching sight of the worn-out human sprawled on the picnic table, the cars spun around and sped away, as if something were chasing them, leaving behind an old woman, half asleep and chuckling.

  She wasn’t on the trail but five minutes the morning of July 22 when she came to a village—so near to where she’d had a terrible time trying to sleep. Hotels, motels, restaurants, houses. The time was 5:45 AM, so nothing was open, but she waited around a bit, hoping to grab a bite to eat before she set off again. A couple men noticed her on the sidewalk and told her the restaurants didn’t open until 8:00 AM. She couldn’t wait that long, so she set off across the bridge over the Delaware River and into New Jersey, the eighth state she’d walked through in eighty days. She hadn’t made it far into New Jersey when a Jeep pulled up beside her and the driver rolled down his window. He was wearing a police uniform.

  What’s your name? the man asked.

  Emma wondered what she had done wrong. She thought, by the way he had said it, that she was in trouble. Maybe he mistook her for a vagrant.

  Emma Gatewood, she said.

  You’re wanted on the telephone, the man said. He opened the door on the passenger side, and she climbed in and they drove to his office not far away. A Sports Illustrated reporter named Mary Snow wanted Emma to call her collect in New York City. It took her an hour to get through and the officer poured Emma a glass of milk and gave her a doughnut while she dialed. When she finally reached Mary Snow, the two chatted for a while and Snow asked Emma to call her on Monday to let Snow know her location. She asked if she could tag along for a bit and write a profile of the hiking grandmother. Emma didn’t see a problem with that. She promised to call.

  The next day was a bitter disappointment. The trail was difficult, high above the Delaware River Valley on Kittatinny Ridge, and she did not make it far on her sprained knee. She slept beside the path, three miles from Crater Lake. A deer came in the night, snorting, and she was glad it wasn’t a bear. She stayed the next night in the High Point Monument, an obelisk built to honor the war dead, and the next in a rest home, of all places, where she had plopped down on the grass out front and waited for the proprietor to invite her in.

  On July 26, she made it to the Appalachian Lodge in Vernon, New Jersey, and found a bed in a shed on an army cot. If she kept the pace, by the next afternoon she’d be in New York, nearing the Hudson River Valley, where she was to meet Mary Snow.

  9

  GOOD HARD LIFE

  JULY 27-AUGUST 2, 1955

  Just south of the hardscrabble river city of Port Jervis, New York, she turned south and snaked along the state line, the low and fertile black-dirt region to her east, until the trail turned north near Greenwood Lake, New York, then back to the east, toward the Palisades Interstate Park, forty miles north of Manhattan and the millions of people rushing about in the city.

  At Lake Mombasha, she met a man and two children who were going for a swim. The man said the lake was private property before starting up the trail. Emma followed them, talking about the trail and chattering about her walk until the man grew interested. She pulled from her bag a few of the newspaper clippings she had collected and was showing the man when a woman walked up and introduced herself as Mary Snow.

  Emma wasn’t able to reach her on Monday or Tuesday when she called, so she was surprised to see Snow waiting. They chatted a while and made plans to meet a few hours later where the trail crossed Route 17, which carried white-knuckled tourists from the city to the Catskill Mountains and back. Snow then said good-bye. Emma started walking and came to a steep and dangerous rock scramble surging skyward called Agony Grind, known to make grown men say embarrassing things. Emma, on a bum leg, would later write in her diary that it was a “pretty hard and rocky piece of trail.”

  When she reached Route 17, Snow was waiting with a police officer’s wife. They drove together to the officer’s house for lunch, then back to the trail, where Emma and her new acquaintance started walking. They talked along the way, with Snow asking question after question. Emma told her she’d carefully avoided snakes and other critters. She talked about eating plants and berries, sustenance she found along the trail, and about relying on the charity of strangers. She mentioned that she’d met both nice and miserable people. She seemed serenely confident that she’d make it to Maine.

  She told Snow something else. When she stood on top of Mount Katahdin—if she made it to the top of Mount Katahdin—she planned to do something special.

  The trail was smooth and easy, and after five miles they reached a new stone shelter on Fingerboard Mountain. Snow told Emma she’d meet her the next morning at 9:30 on Bear Mountain, a few miles away, hard against the Hudson River. There were two boys at the shelter, which was built atop a huge boulder. It had a tin roof and fireplaces at both ends, and it was filthy.

  Emma decided to sleep outside instead, and she found a nice grassy spot on which to spread her blanket. The boys moved down behind a large rock, in some leaves. Emma felt raindrops in the night, so she grabbed her bag and scrambled through the dark to the shelter. She turned her flashlight on for the boys, who seemed content to sleep in the rain. She needed rest, though. She had to be up early to make it to Bear Mountain on time. And the climb ahead would be rough.

  Emma returned from California to a financial mess. P.C. had mismanaged the farm in her absence. They had no money to pay the mortgage and could not find a way to appease the creditors. In 1938, they had to let the farm go.

  They bought the smaller George Sheets farm up the river from Crown City, Ohio, and moved in on May 30, but they would be gone by the following year. Something had gotten into P.C. He would not let Emma out of his sight. He refused to work unless she came along, whether it was building fences or pounding rock or cutting wood.

  Occasionally, Emma would slip a few sandwiches into a paper bag and take her two young daughters into the woods to hunt for wildflowers. They’d walk over hills and into valleys all day long, identifying bloodroot and windflowers, bluets and buttercups and trilliums. On one of their flower hunts near Possum Hollow, a gentle rain was falling, washing the woodlands, and they found a large, moss-covered boulder protruding from the earth, covered with delicate hepaticas. It was a sight they’d never forget.

  Emma would later write that her husband beat her beyond recognition ten times that year.

  The reporters gathered early near the observatory on Bear Mountain on July 28, a bevy of them with Mary Snow of Sports Illustrated, to wait for Grandma Emma Gatewood, who would be arriving at 9:30 AM. Ten o’clock passed, then eleven, then noon, an
d there was no sign yet of Emma. The newspapermen and photographers began to peel away, one by one, disappointed and a bit worried about the old woman. Mary Snow held out, but ventured down the mountain for lunch.

  Emma had walked as hard as she could to make it on time, but the section of trail was steep and her injury made the climb difficult. She caught up with a group of hikers, though, and asked them how far she was from Bear Mountain.

  Seven miles, one of them said. They pointed to a peak on the horizon and off she went.

  By the time she arrived at the top, four hours late, all of the reporters had gone. Mary Snow and a tall policeman soon arrived and the policeman took photographs of Emma, hand on her hip, a green eyeshade pulled down over her nut-brown forehead, her sack slung over her left shoulder. A few tourists noticed and began snapping her picture as well. When the policeman was finished, Emma headed down the mountain and Snow met her in a car at the bottom and took her to a restaurant. That night Snow paid for a cabin in Fort Montgomery, on the west bank of the Hudson. Emma said goodbye, then washed her clothes and dried them by a fire and fell asleep.

  She had tried to find a map but had no luck, so the next morning at 6:00 AM she walked back to where Snow had fetched her and found the nearest white blaze and followed it toward the Bear Mountain Bridge, an impressive suspension bridge of steel and concrete, completed thirty-one years before. She noticed the railroad tracks running underneath the automobile lanes. She had never dreamed she would get to walk across the Hudson River on a bridge, but step-by-step she went as cars blurred by. She stopped in the middle, suspended between the water and the sky, to behold the sights. Downriver was New York City, and to the north was the United States Military Academy at West Point, where monuments to dead soldiers dotted the manicured grounds. It was here, during the Revolutionary War, that colonists stretched a giant chain across the Hudson to stop British ships from traveling upriver.

  Across the bridge, she walked over swampy but level ground and stumbled onto a Girl Scout camp about 8:00 AM. The campers were still sleeping, so Emma routed them out from their beds. They’d intended to get up early to break camp. She pressed on and slept that night on a pile of leaves near the trail.

  She left again at 5:30 AM, thirsty and looking for water, and walked until she heard the gurgle of a stream. Following the sound she found a new well, but the water flowing out was muddy. She approached the house nearby and a woman kindly filled her canteen and offered Emma breakfast.

  Farther down the trail, near Stormville, New York, in the Fish-kill Mountains, she came to something called the Lost Village. It appeared to be a museum, so she wandered in. The Lost Village had been open just two months, and its proprietors had recently made the controversial claim that the American cowboy had originated there, a short commute from New York City, despite the legends of the West. Two city dwellers had found the place several years before, on a weekend trip upstate to look for land. They discovered several stone foundations and various pieces of pottery and iron kettles and, after reviewing some historical maps, decided to campaign publicly that the original “cowboys” were British cattle thieves who raided rich Dutch settlers from a lawless encampment on the mountain. It helped that the husband was a publicist and the wife a writer. The newspapers ran stories. The proprietors charged admission at the door.

  Emma didn’t dispute the claims. She looked around, then left, and jotted her feelings later in her diary. “Some things there were fakes, I am sure,” she wrote.

  As the sun set July 30, she followed a side trail to the Ludington Girl Scout Camp, near Holmes, New York, the village from which the first thru-hiker, Earl V. Shaffer, had mailed his groundbreaking letter to the Appalachian Trail Conference. Emma introduced herself. The counselors asked her to stay, and after dinner they parked Emma in front of the fireplace and sat the girls at her feet, little ones in the front. She told them story after story about her trip. When she was finished, all the girls wanted her autograph. In a shaky hand, Emma signed every scrap of paper.

  She slept on a cot in a tent that night and the kitchen staff sent her away early the next morning with a full belly, a sack lunch for the trail, and a handful of bouillon cubes. She hiked the next day past Nuclear Lake and over Burton Brook and Swamp River and made it to another Girl Scout camp in Wingdale, New York, by nightfall and again enjoyed the company, and the dinner of steamed brown bread and celery.

  On the first day of August, she left New York and entered Connecticut, the ninth state in which she’d planted her sneakers. She wanted to make it twenty miles up the Housatonic River Valley to Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, before dark, but despite walking hard all day, she hadn’t reached town when the sky went black. As she was hoofing down the shoulder of a gravel mountain road, a car stopped beside her and a man with booze-hazed eyes looked her over.

  Why in the world are you walking in such a place after night for? he asked.

  She told him she was trying to make it to town before dark.

  Get in, he said in a demanding tone. I’ll take you to my sister’s a half-mile down the road.

  She hesitated. She wasn’t sure she trusted him.

  Get on in here, he said. You can’t get to Cornwall Bridge tonight.

  She did as he said, but she wasn’t sure it was wise. His appearance was dulled, and Emma was pretty sure he was full of strong drink, but he did what he promised. The man’s sister, Mrs. Charles Moore, wouldn’t hear of Emma going any farther that night.

  Emma woke early and walked back to where the man had picked her up, then back to the Moores’ for breakfast. She’d come this far without skipping a single step of the trail, and she wasn’t about to start cheating. She hiked the five miles into Cornwall Bridge and poked into the post office to see if she had any mail. She didn’t. She called the home of Patrick Hare, a local man she had met at Shenandoah National Park, but no one answered. She ate dinner at the home of Mrs. Clarence Blake, a correspondent for the local newspaper.

  The story in the Waterbury Republican ran the next day, as Emma followed the trail along a picturesque ravine, past clear waterfalls, and under a tall hemlock canopy that excluded most of the sunlight, then through a plateau of giant boulders and into the majestic Cathedral Pines, an old-growth white-pine and hemlock forest with trees reaching more than one hundred feet into the sky.

  GREAT-GRANDMOTHER GUNS ALONG, the headline read.

  Blake noted that Emma had worn out three pairs of shoes and had lost twenty-four pounds in the three months she’d been walking. “Even the beginning of the hike was done on a spur of the moment basis. Mrs. Gatewood just started out equipped with a canteen, a 25-pound pack and some ‘spending money,’” the article read. “Mrs. Gatewood has had no special training as a hiker, except for the good hard life of raising her 11 children on a farm in Ohio.” The article spoke of her determination, and how she had established a pace of about seventeen miles per day, “rain or shine.”

  The shine part was easy.

  10

  STORM

  AUGUST 3–11, 1955

  On the morning of August 3, sailors aboard the SS Mormacreed, traveling off the coast of French Guiana, noticed unusually strong winds blowing in from the west. They carried showery, squally weather. Around the same time and several hundred miles north, a freighter called the African Sun passed through a strong easterly wave that tossed the massive ship like a doll. At 10:00 AM, another vessel, the SS Bonaire, radioed the National Weather Bureau in Miami, Florida, to report a falling barometric pressure and northeasterly winds blowing at more than forty miles per hour. Waves were breaking at twenty feet and it was becoming clear that a vortex had formed at the top end of the easterly wave.

  A hurricane was born.

  A reconnaissance plane spotted the eye of the storm, which was pushing winds at fifty-five knots and surging west-northwest over the warm North Atlantic waters at sixteen miles per hour, slowly increasing in size and intensity, sucking up moist tropical air from the surface and discha
rging cooler air aloft, breathing in and out and growing as if it were a living thing. When the eye of the storm passed fifty miles north of the northern Leeward Islands and Puerto Rico, maximum winds were estimated at 125 miles per hour and the storm had splayed heavy rain bands, like fingers, for miles in all directions.

  In the coming days, Hurricane Connie would change direction, stall, spin north, then northwest, avoiding Florida and lining up to slam North Carolina and rake its way up the Atlantic seaboard toward southern New England, toward towns that would need new maps and people who would lose their lives and their loved ones and spend terrible hours clinging to treetops as floodgates crashed and rivers escaped their banks.

  In those slow days before the hurricane made landfall, though, before the obituaries had been written and before the nation’s news magazines had questioned whether the weather of 1955 was the worst in recorded history, the people of New England set about their daily routines. The same was true for the stranger in the tiny town of Amesville, Connecticut, who woke at Eva Bates’s house a little before six o’clock, slung her bag on her shoulder, and rejoined the Appalachian Trail. Emma walked until she came to a low, swampy stretch in the woods, where the mosquitoes rose from the earth in thick clouds. She slapped at them a few times and then hurried to higher ground, where she stopped to thin them out.

  Sick of fighting the biting bugs, she walked into a town to pick up some repellant oil from a dime store. Salisbury, Connecticut, wasn’t much more than a wide spot in the road, but years before, it was known as the “Arsenal of the Revolution.” For two hundred years, men pulled iron ore from the ground and shaped it into implements and guns and cannons.

  As Emma was leaving town, a woman recognized her as the hiking grandmother from the newspaper and called out across the street. She invited Emma inside and served her milk and sweet cakes. A few minutes after she had started down the trail again, she saw a man standing in the road with a camera hanging around his neck. He asked her if he could take her photograph. She didn’t mind. Ten minutes later, a reporter from the paper stopped her again and questioned her about the journey. This was becoming routine, and she wondered if she’d ever make it to Maine.