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

by Montgomery, Ben

  She surged forward, up Lions Head at the southern end of the Taconic Range, up Bear Mountain, the highest summit in Connecticut, across the Sages Ravine, its waterfalls dancing over moss-covered rock, where she saw her first porcupine, then into Massachusetts, leaving nine states behind her now on day number ninety-three.

  That afternoon, she hiked a ways with a pack of Boy Scouts, but by nightfall they had not found shelter and so the boys stopped to set up camp. Emma left them behind and climbed Mount Everett. There she found a fire tower but could not find a shelter. Everett’s vistas were breathtaking, but it was too rocky to sleep on the precipice, so she went a bit farther and raked together a pile of leaves beside a boulder as darkness fell.

  Before she drifted off, Emma heard a voice. It belonged to one of the scout leaders. She got up and found them at the summit, flashlight beams shining through the trees, where they were searching for the shelter. Even with a trail map the leaders could not find it. They left the scouts with Emma and went stomping around in the darkness. The boys looked thirsty, and Emma had a little water in her canteen. She offered it to them, but they refused to take it. When the leaders returned, she went back to her trail-side bed of leaves.

  The rain started the next day, on August 5.

  What was already a slow slog grew slower. Emma made it just two and a half miles in the morning. She met a man that afternoon, Joe Seifert of Newark, New Jersey, who was thru-hiking the trail in the opposite direction, from north to south. They talked an hour but the downpour grew so heavy they could not continue their conversation. After sunset, Emma noticed a cluster of three houses, but no one would invite her in. She climbed over another mountain in the rain and finally found a kind soul, a woman named Mrs. Norris. The next evening, after another day of hiking through the rain, she tried to stay with a man named Moore, but he didn’t have room. He offered his car. She reclined in the seat and caught a decent night’s sleep. It was better than a picnic table by a mile.

  The rain clouds parted momentarily the next morning and Emma hiked into Washington, Massachusetts, where Mrs. Fred Hutchinson started to fill her canteen, thinking she was a berry picker, until Emma spoke up and got herself invited to dinner, then to a nap on the couch, then to the obligatory newspaper interview, then to a night in a bed.

  The morning of Monday, August 8, Emma traversed Warner Hill and Tully Mountain, near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and was approaching Dalton when Hurricane Connie reached its maximum intensity five hundred miles east of West Palm Beach, Florida, moving north-northwest at fifteen miles per hour, drawing a bead on the East Coast. Its winds were churning at 135 miles per hour near the eye, and gales extended 350 miles farther north. A navy reconnaissance plane measured the eye. It was forty miles wide.

  The pilot, Lt. Commander R. T. Pittman of Covington, Georgia, called Hurricane Connie “the biggest storm I’ve ever seen.” Another, Lieutenant Alfred M. Fowler of Waterloo, Iowa, gave this description:

  In the eye, you would think you were sitting in the middle of a big amphitheatre. All around you in a huge circle were bands of white clouds. Below was a deck of stratocumulus clouds and above was the bright blue sky. We flew up to 10,000 feet and the walls of the amphitheater still rose above us.

  It was hot and wet in the center, as well, full of eighty-six-degree tropical air.

  The National Weather Bureau issued small craft warnings for boats from Block Island, Rhode Island, to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, as people along the Atlantic Coast brought lawn furniture inside and stocked up on nonperishables and hammered storm shutters over windows. The bureau called it a “severe” hurricane, but no one yet knew the course the storm would choose.

  “We’re sweating it out,” Walter Davis, a storm warning forecaster in Miami, told the Associated Press. “Our best judgment is that Connie will be affected by the southern portion of the trough and will turn northward, then northeastward. Time will tell.”

  By that afternoon, as Emma popped into the post office at Dalton, where the clerk recognized her and introduced her to everyone in the room, the giant storm rushed northwest, swelling, gaining strength. Warning flags flapped from Cape Lookout, North Carolina, to Norfolk, Virginia, and the tides grew by three feet. Seven hundred airmen from the air force, army, navy, and marines hustled to move planes and vehicles inland from the coast, to Spartanburg, South Carolina. Giant waves lapped at coastal beaches and gales of seventy-five miles per hour stretched three hundred miles north of the eye. The North Carolina Highway Patrol, Red Cross disaster specialists, and Civil Air Patrol personnel organized for rescue missions.

  That evening, as Emma walked into Cheshire, Massachusetts, and checked in at Leroy’s Tourist Home, something else had become evident in the Atlantic, as well. Ships traveling five hundred miles from the northernmost Leeward Islands, well behind the hurricane, were reporting new bands of heavy rain and east winds up to forty-five miles per hour. While Hurricane Connie slogged toward the coast, another threatening storm was developing in its wake.

  The second storm had forecasters baffled. Would it peter out and disappear in the Atlantic? Would it weaken as another trough passed to the north? Or would it intensify and follow Connie toward the United States, setting up a nightmarish situation for the people along the coast?

  Before her, through the dark and low-slung clouds that raced north on the morning of August 9, stood the highest point in Massachusetts: Greylock Mountain. If the Berkshires behind her were light and inviting, Greylock, at 3,491 feet, served as a domineering challenge.

  The mountain inspired some of the greatest authors of American literature. Herman Melville drew inspiration from Greylock while working on Moby-Dick, 105 years before Emma marched through. He thought the mountain looked like a whale, and he had a view of it from his writing room in Pittsfield. Henry David Thoreau wrote about his 1844 climb in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, summiting the mountain a year before his experiment at Walden Pond. There was, no doubt, something special about the mountain, but the two men took distinctly different views. The themes in A Week and Melville’s “The Piazza,” a story set on Greylock, both involve a man on a quest who meets a woman. To the narrator in “The Piazza,” the woman, a “fairy queen sitting at her fairy-window,” represents a disappointment; he had climbed the mountain to investigate the magical source of light he had seen from town below, and he finds an orphaned, isolated girl who had been wondering from afar about a similar curious light coming from his house down below. For Thoreau, the mountain woman had “lively sparkling eyes” and was “full of interest in the lower world from which I had come” and he thinks of “returning to this house, which was well kept and so nobly paced, the next day, and perhaps remaining a week there, if I could have entertainment.” Scholars would wonder for decades to come about the opposing views of Greylock, of nature represented by a woman on a mountain. But rare would be the conversation about why both female characters were stagnant and isolated from the world below.

  Here came another sojourner, more than a century later, this time a woman with the wind at her back, summiting Greylock at noon and finding a mountaintop restaurant where she sat to enjoy a hamburger, a glass of milk, and, for dessert, a bowl of ice cream, before making her descent toward North Adams and bedding down in the wild beside the trail, completely comfortable.

  She continued through the Berkshires the next day, and randomly three high school boys and six girls joined her as she ventured through a valley and into the forest. They were talking and laughing as Emma told them about her trip.

  I wish my grandmother was like you, said one of the girls.

  Emma felt like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

  Around dusk, the girls headed back, but the boys continued walking with Emma. They led her to a freshwater spring and collected leaves to make her a bed nearby. Then they wished her well and headed back up the trail. She wrote about the boys and girls in her diary, and how much fun she’d had, and she relaxed on the leaves and finally found
sleep.

  That night as she dreamed, eight hundred miles to the south, monstrous waves began licking the coast between Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Wilmington, North Carolina. The tide surged five feet, six feet, seven feet—higher than normal—and the ravishing winds began flicking shingles off beach cottages and lifting boards from fishing piers and ripping tree limbs from branches. As the eye of the storm neared land it threw tornadoes across the low country, bouncing around South Carolina tobacco towns such as Conway, Latta, Dillon, and Bucksport, where one cut a swath two hundred yards wide and a quarter mile long, injuring a woman, her two daughters, and her son. Another twister dropped near Goldsboro, North Carolina, 150 miles north, damaging a tobacco barn and exploding the dwelling occupied by a man, his wife, and their three children, who were not injured.

  Along the coast, evacuees by the thousands packed into churches and schools and other structures made of concrete farther inland. Farmers sealed up tobacco barns. Hospitals turned to auxiliary power. The navy secured its battleships. The National Guard evacuated two thousand coastal residents of New Bern, North Carolina, to higher ground. One hundred miles east of Boston, Massachusetts, construction workers were scurrying to sink and secure the massive legs of a radar island.

  The storm slowed for a spell off the coast, sucking up moisture, cooling a little, and by the time the eye reached land near Morehead City, North Carolina, it was bursting with one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds and rainfall for the record books. It ripped off roofs and carried houses to sea. It chewed up fishing piers made of steel. And it slowly began to set a new course, turning toward the north, toward New England.

  About twelve hundred miles behind the beast, closer to the equator, the winds of the second storm were quickly growing, and observers noticed a large cyclone circulating northeast of the Leeward Islands. They gave it a name: Tropical Storm Diane. A reconnaissance plane flying over the new storm measured steady gusts nearing fifty miles per hour and intensifying.

  Rain was falling when Emma woke, trailside, early on August 11. She hiked alone in the morning and was quickly soaked through, head to sneaker. She sloshed across the state line, leaving Massachusetts behind and entering Vermont on the Long Trail through the Green Mountains, toward the higher and more rugged section of the Appalachians, and the path was made horrible by the rain. Her shoes picked up mud and made walking hard and dangerous at times. In the afternoon she was joined by a pack of Boy Scouts; she didn’t mind the company so she kept pace with the teens. She noticed one of their leaders occasionally watching her walk, as if he were studying the old woman’s gait for lessons. After a while, he spoke up. He complimented Emma on her walking, and said her energy and determination to finish what she had started were admirable. She liked to hear that.

  The Boy Scouts broke off and Emma hiked alone for a stretch, the clouds still soaking the earth, finally coming to a shelter near a mountain pond. Two young men, in their early twenties, had already claimed the little cabin for the night. They’d started a fire and were cooking dinner when she walked in, sopping wet. They didn’t seem too happy to see her come along, but it was obvious there was no way she was leaving.

  Harold Bell had just gotten out of the navy and Steve Sargent had left the US Naval Academy at Annapolis. They were hiking the Long Trail from Massachusetts to Killington, Vermont, doing some fishing and exploring along the way. They were surprised to see an elderly woman on this rugged, isolated section of trail, but they invited her in and made small talk. The young men were blown away that she had hiked all the way from Georgia, and even more surprised that she was carrying a shoulder sack that weighed less than twenty pounds. For ten days of hiking, the navy boys had each packed fifty-five-pound backpacks, and they felt a little foolish.

  When it was time for bed, they hung blankets from the ceiling to divide the room. Like many of those Emma met along the trail, the young men would remember her for the rest of their lives, because of that chance meeting, and even more so because of what would happen a few days later, when they saw her again.

  11

  SHELTER

  AUGUST 12–13, 1955

  That Friday was the rainiest August day in the written history of New York City. And what was left of Hurricane Connie, which made landfall at Morehead, North Carolina, before scraping up the Atlantic Coast, had just begun its onslaught in the Northeast. Ten people in the metropolis already were dead from the floods, a number that would continue to climb. Between midnight Thursday and midnight Friday, Connie dumped nearly six inches of rain on New York. Faced with flooding in various parts of the city, sixty thousand volunteers in New York’s civil defense program were on standby. The headline in the New York Times read, CONNIE BLOWS NORTH WITH FORCE EQUAL TO THOUSANDS OF H-BOMBS.

  Behind the storm was a path of waterlogged destruction. In Wilmington, North Carolina, city hall was flooded by eighteen inches of water. Near Hampton Roads, Virginia, hurricane winds had slammed two freighters together. Seventy Red Cross shelters in the Carolinas held 14,756 refugees. Much of the tobacco and corn crop had been ruined.

  At North Beach, Maryland, a young woman staggered out of the choppy Chesapeake Bay and collapsed on shore, and locals sounded an alarm. Wreckage from a sixty-four-year-old schooner called the Levin J. Marvel, which had been carrying tourists on a cruise, began to wash up. By the end of the day, a coroner had laid out ten bodies, still wearing life preservers, at the North Beach fire station.

  Behind Connie, too, was another storm. In the darkness between August 11 and 12, the season’s fourth hurricane curved abruptly to the northeast and picked up speed. The intensification was so rapid that overnight the winds increased from 50 miles per hour to 125 miles per hour.

  The rain bands north of Connie covered virtually all of New England, dropping eight inches of rain on Connecticut in just two days. To the north, the rain running off the Green Mountains and White Mountains rapidly filled brooks and streams, which began to crest their banks and picked up velocity as they flowed downhill and fed into larger creeks and rivers.

  Two hundred miles north of soaked New York City, Emma woke in a cabin in the woods, happy to have dry clothes thanks to the little fire. The navy boys were planning on sticking around the cabin to do some fishing, so she bade them good-bye and headed down the trail in a light rain. In the daybreak she could see that the nearby pond had swollen during the night and was pouring out over the trail. A wooden bridge across the stream was now a series of floating logs and she got her feet wet immediately while trying to get across. She wore a plastic cape around her shoulders but soon realized it was no use trying to stay dry. Minutes into her hike her clothes were soaked, and the wetter her sack got, the heavier her haul.

  She had heard about a nice, well-kept shelter on Bromley Mountain, and for most of the hike she fantasized about getting out of the rain, drying her clothes, and having a hot bite to eat. In the late afternoon, when she came into a clearing and saw the shelter, Emma stopped in her tracks and gaped. Even from the outside, it appeared to be the most down-at-the-heels place she could imagine. To begin with, the lodge was abandoned. The doors were off their hinges and the windows had been broken out. When she stepped inside, rain was pouring through holes in the roof. Porcupines had eaten big chunks out of the wood floors. The stove was unusable.

  She hung her wet clothes on an old ladder and stretched it over a fireplace. She got a fire going to dry out her things, but everything was so wet that she couldn’t build enough heat. Disappointed though she was, she made the best of her surroundings. The water pouring in from a big hole in the roof made a decent stream in which she washed her clothes. Her sleep was intermittent. She couldn’t keep dry in bed that night, due to the leaks.

  In July 1939, P. C. Gatewood sold his second farm and announced to his family that they were moving to Barkers Ridge, West Virginia, where he had bought an even smaller patch of land on which he hoped to grow tobacco. The farm was in disrepair and the fences needed work, but a log cabin sat
on the property and there was room for a few sheep. Emma did not want to leave Ohio, but there was no use in fighting. So they packed their things into the truck and moved across the river, eighteen miles east of Huntington. She cried quietly the whole way.

  The three children still living at home—Nelson, fifteen; Louise, thirteen; and Lucy, eleven—enrolled in school, and Emma got a job as a government monitor, her role to make certain no farmer planted more tobacco than he was allowed. She tried to make the best of her new life. She braided rugs and planted vegetables and found time to write poetry, rhymes that seemed to be longing for a better situation. She mailed back one untitled poem to her home newspaper in Gallipolis, which published it.

  A home is made of many things,

  Books and papers and little strings,

  A comb and brush to fix one’s hair,

  A mending basket, and easy chair.

  A clock, some music, the Sacred Book,

  A kitchen stove and food to cook.

  The sound of little feet about

  Up the stairs, and in and out.

  Little trinkets on the floor,

  Trains and cars and dolls galore.

  Children’s clothes and children’s beds,

  A kitty cat that must be fed.

  A dog to warn us with his bark,

  When someone bothers when it’s dark.

  A mother that is kind and good,

  And patient with her little brood.

  A great big place must Father fill,