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

by Montgomery, Ben

  And she waited. Nobody came by noon, or by one o’clock, or by two, or by three. Long hours she spent idle. Then, around four o’clock, she heard someone coming. She stood and peered down the trail and saw who it was: Howard Bell and Steve Sargent, the two boys she had met several days before. The navy boys. She couldn’t have planned it better. She was surprised, and very happy to see those two.

  They’d had a rough go. What started as a nice little outdoor break from the navy had turned into a wet and soppy journey. It had rained eight out of the nine days they’d been on the trail, so much that their feet were blistered and they were miserable.

  Emma told them about her predicament and walked them down to the gorge that was now so wide and flowing so fast. The young men inspected the water and decided they could wade across if they took some precautions. They walked back to where they had dropped their backpacks. One of the boys fished a big bunch of parachute cord from his. He tied Emma’s sack securely to the top of his big, heavy backpack, then tied a length of cord around his waist. The other young man tied a cord around his own waist and they walked down to the water’s edge.

  Emma stood between them and they looped the cord around her waist, tying her firmly in the middle, a human sandwich. When the knots were tight, the boys each took one of her hands and they began to slowly wade against the roaring current. The water inched past their knees, then their waists, then up to their chests, beating hard against their bodies. They strained against the current. Emma closed her eyes, feeling the stone riverbed with her feet, trying for all she was worth to hold on. Step by slippery, precarious step.

  Her head was swimming. She opened her eyes, but couldn’t look at the current that was trying to suck her downstream. She tilted her chin back and stared up at the sky instead, and squeezed the boys’ hands.

  One of the young men, Sargent, would say fifty-seven years later that he was so scared crossing that river that he still visited it in his dreams at the age of seventy-nine. “We were touch and go getting across,” he would say. The other, Bell, would recall how fast the water was flowing, and how he felt that one misstep would send them all rushing downstream, tangled in rope. They’d both come back decades later to hike the same ground, and they’d fondly remember Emma’s friendly, determined nature. “She was one tough old bird,” Bell would say.

  That day, though, there in the middle of the rushing water, so close to catastrophe, Emma Gatewood laughed out loud at how ridiculous it was that a sixty-seven-year-old woman had gotten herself into such a predicament.

  They finally reached dry ground and scrambled up the bank. She ducked into woods to change from her wet Bermuda shorts and back into her dungarees.

  “Well,” she said, reappearing, “you got grandma across.”

  13

  DESTRUCTION

  AUGUST 16–20, 1955

  The folks at the Long Trail Lodge were expecting her, and when Emma arrived at the hotel near Killington, Vermont, that afternoon, they fixed her a sandwich in the kitchen then put her on the phone with a reporter from the Rutland Herald. Rutland was about nine miles west.

  It seemed like the whole country wanted to know what she was up to now, and reporters were following her every move. If the first three-quarters of the journey had been considered a novel attempt at greatness by an eccentric old lady, now that she was on the home stretch, she had captured the attention of the country. An Associated Press dispatch went out the next day, reporting that Emma had lost twenty-four pounds and worn out five pairs of shoes. “So far she has walked 1700 miles,” the article read, “with about 350 miles more to go to Mt. Katahdin.”

  Three hundred fifty miles left. What the article didn’t mention was that the miles before her were some of the most difficult, perilous miles on the trail. She had faced cold nights in the South in the spring, but there were nights ahead when the temperature would drop below freezing and the skies would spit stinging sleet. She’d averaged roughly fifteen miles a day so far, but her daily mileage would be cut to a third of that once she reached the White Mountains of New Hampshire, just ahead. And as northbound hikers before her had learned, there were long stretches, including the daunting 100 Mile Wilderness, which were so isolated and inaccessible that carrying enough food to survive for a week or more was a necessity.

  Emma figured she might as well get started.

  She followed the narrowest path she’d encountered so far— “About like a squirrel would use,” she thought—up and over and around some boulders and into Gifford Woods State Park. Earl V. Shaffer stayed at the same park seven years before, on his inaugural thru-hike in 1948. “There I signed the register, then talked to Grace Barrows, the first and only lady Ranger met on the Long Cruise,” Shaffer wrote later. “She told me that the lean-tos in the Park were available at a nominal fee. But several hours of daylight remained and I decided to keep going. Mrs. Barrows misunderstood and always blamed herself for my going. She told me years later that she never charged a through-hiker after that, regardless of regulations.”

  Alas, when Emma arrived, Mrs. Barrows, conflicted, said she did not like to charge, but as it was a state park she was required to charge a dollar. Emma didn’t mind and fetched a dollar from her pocket, even if she planned to sleep in the grass.

  “To ease her conscience,” Emma wrote in her journal, “she brought me a tray of hot baked potatoes, slices of ham, beets, bread, two slices of jelly roll, glass of milk, and hot coffee.”

  Mrs. Barrows mentioned that two young men had come off the trail and reserved the adjacent table on which to sleep. Emma was delighted to find it was the navy boys who helped her across the creek. She gave them her drip coffee, some crackers, a piece of jelly roll and some cookies to supplement their dinner. They all stayed awake a while talking and then Emma went to sleep on a big pile of leaves. In the night, she felt a couple of cold sprinkles on her face and she quickly grabbed her sack and headed to the porch of the caretaker’s home. The boys trudged up onto the porch a few minutes later, good and wet. A few other men who had been working on the trail had made their beds on the tables, so Emma lay on the floor. Soon enough, the rain started falling harder and blowing under the overhang and the porch floor grew wetter by the minute. Emma climbed upon a table and the navy boys doubled up on another. None of them got much sleep.

  As they dried their clothes over a fire early the next morning, Hurricane Diane was plunging into the East Coast eight hundred miles south, not far from where Hurricane Connie had made landfall five days before. The storm was packing winds of one hundred miles per hour near the eye and moving west at fourteen miles per hour, but observers were already saying that Diane wasn’t going to cause nearly as much damage as Connie. Houses had been damaged by waves and streets were flooded in coastal towns, but the storm didn’t pack the punch of its predecessor. It quickly began losing steam, so much so that hurricane warnings were expected to be called off that afternoon. What the forecasters weren’t taking into account, however, was that the storm’s path would keep it centered over the coast, so it continued to suck up moisture from the Atlantic and sling it inland, onto ground still saturated by Connie.

  On the trail, the hikers were oblivious. News came by word of mouth, and with the Washington Weather Bureau downplaying the storm already, there wasn’t any alarm, even when the storm started tracking north.

  A volunteer who had been clearing the trail came with bad news: a beaver dam had caused flooding and the valley below was impassable. He knew Emma was hiking the trail, and he told her there was no way she could cross the flooded stretch. He offered to drive her around it and she accepted. Faced with an impassable obstacle, these two miles were the only on the A.T. she’d miss.

  On August 18, Emma headed east toward the Connecticut River, the dividing feature between Vermont and New Hampshire, and in the evening she walked into a town called Hartland and looked for a store to stock up. She talked to the proprietor for a few minutes and he told her she could probably find her a pl
ace to stay about half a mile or so off the trail.

  She followed his directions and was headed down the road when a car pulled up beside her. A woman asked Emma her name, then said they had been searching for her. The woman was Mrs. Ruetenik, and they were from Ohio. When they saw the newspaper story and realized Emma was so close and would be coming down the trail soon, they set out to find her. Mrs. Ruetenik asked if Emma needed a place to stay the night and offered her a bed in a cabin they were house-sitting for some friends. Emma accepted the invitation and piled in the car and rode with them a few miles to the mountainside home, which had a lovely view of the countryside. Mrs. Ruetenik had a baby and a few small children, but she didn’t seem worried at all about her ragged company. She served Emma hot dogs and tomatoes as they sat outside and enjoyed the view.

  Meanwhile, to the south, the outer bands of Hurricane Diane, which had been downgraded to a tropical storm, were dumping water on New England as they moved north. Nobody seemed too concerned about the menacing clouds, but they soon began to understand that the new rainfall was rapidly filling smaller rivers and streams. It wasn’t until late in the afternoon that the first flash-flood warning was issued. As people across the region went to sleep to the sound of rain pattering their roofs, the water began to rise.

  The mayor of Milton, West Virgina, didn’t know Emma’s history, didn’t know about P.C. or the decades of abuse or the details of their final fight, but he knew a battered spouse when he saw one. And he knew that a fifty-three-year-old woman with broken teeth and a cracked rib did not belong in jail.

  He talked to her for a while and felt sorry for her. The miscarriage of justice had to be corrected. He invited Emma to stay in his home, safe and protected, until she got back on her feet. He got her a job working in a restaurant for some spending money.

  Back home, the children were in a state of confusion. Their mother had sent word that she was OK, and that they’d be together soon, but the three still at home—Nelson, Louise, and Lucy—didn’t know what to expect next.

  They got up early one morning and, with the help of a few neighbors, killed and cleaned a hog. They built a fire under a barrel of water and strung the hog up before it was time for the kids to go to school. When they arrived home from school that afternoon, their father was gone. P.C. had taken the bedroom sets and furniture and nearly everything they owned out of the house. There on the table was half of the hog carcass, a parting gift.

  Nelson, the oldest still at home at fifteen, had been working as an assistant to the janitor at school and he had always been tight with his money. His older sister Esther once asked him if he’d like a little spending money, and when he said he would, she gave him a dime. A few weeks later, she asked him if he needed a little more and he replied, “No, I still got that dime.” He had eventually saved up enough money to buy a Remington single-shot, bolt-action rifle and a bicycle with a headlight and fenders for twenty-six dollars from Montgomery Ward in Huntington. Now he found some pocket change and rode that new bicycle three miles to the general store, where he phoned his mother and told her that their father was gone.

  You want me to stay and help get things straightened up tomorrow? he asked her.

  No, go on to school, she said. I’ll be on the first bus.

  When the children stepped off the bus the next day, Emma greeted them. She had put the meat away and organized the house. She had taken care of everything and carried on without mentioning the recent chaos, as though she’d never left.

  She was planning to ask a judge for a peace bond, which would require P.C. to keep his hands off her, but she learned that he had hired a lawyer to dispute her claims. So she hired a lawyer, too, and on September 6, 1940, at the big stone courthouse in Huntington, West Virginia, Emma Gatewood, after thirty-five years of matrimony, filed for divorce.

  Five months later, on February 6, 1941, Emma and her lawyer appeared before a judge and divorce commissioner. Emma testified to the discord in her marriage, to the abuse she had suffered and the ways in which she had been mistreated. After consideration, the judge issued his decree: “That the bond of matrimony heretofore existing between the plaintiff, Emma R. Gatewood, and the defendant, P.C. Gatewood, is hereby dissolved and the said plaintiff is hereby granted an absolute divorce from the defendant from the bond of matrimony.”

  He awarded Emma custody of Louise, fourteen; Lucy, twelve; and Nelson, sixteen; and demanded that P.C. pay Emma fifteen dollars a month in alimony. He also awarded Emma the farm on Barkers Ridge and demanded that P.C. continue to make payments on it. If he failed to do that, he’d be called back to court.

  Emma wrote later that she had been “happy ever since.”

  “I know when I go to bed that no brute of a man is going to kick me out into the floor and then lie out of it,” she wrote.

  But he wasn’t done causing her grief. He would fail to pay monthly alimony and run up a debt of two hundred dollars. Then, when she threatened to sue, he’d promise to deed her the farm and give her half of what he owed.

  But she could deal with that. Their relationship was finally over. He would never again lay a hand on her.

  Portrait, age fifty-four, 1942.

  Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds

  She crossed the Connecticut River into New Hampshire at Hanover and walked quickly through town, hoping that no one had alerted another newspaper reporter to her presence. She was beginning to tire of the consistent delays. To make matters worse, the reporter in Rutland a few days before had somehow gotten the idea that she intended to square-dance in front of the television cameras when she finished the trail. And CBS News had broadcast the error on television. She had no intention of square-dancing in private, much less in front of the American television-viewing public.

  At least it wasn’t raining in Hanover.

  She didn’t know it then, but the storm chasing Emma up the coast was causing massive devastation to the south as it slung a final black band of rain on New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. The storm had been nearly counted out by weathermen on Thursday; it looked like nothing more than a low-pressure system moving over New England. But it was still moving, rotating in a vast counterclockwise direction, sucking up warm and moisture-laden air from the Atlantic and pushing humidity in the Northeast to sultry, almost tropical levels. Then came a low-pressure trough. Wet air rose, cooled, expanded, and began falling across the region. Diane was not dead. Not yet.

  In the early morning hours in Waterbury, Connecticut, where Emma had stopped to visit with Mrs. Clarence Blake two weeks before, floodwaters from the Naugatuck River had surged thirty-five feet in places, topping riverbanks and washing away bridges and homes, destroying businesses and sucking families into the raging water. Parents tied their children to treetops as they prayed for rescue. In Winsted, the serene Mad River smashed through town and isolated residents from rescuers. In Farmington, a rescue boat capsized, sending little Patricia Ann Bechard to her death, and a fireman lashed little Linda Barolomeo to a tree before he was washed into floodwaters himself. In Seymour, the water unearthed caskets from a graveyard and sent them bobbing downstream. In Putnam, a magnesium plant caught fire and shot flames 250 feet in the air. Everywhere, police and firefighters were rushing from house to house, ordering residents to get out. The entire town of Ellenville, New York, population four thousand, was evacuated. But for many, the warnings came too late.

  The rainfall totals in Connecticut were unbelievable. Fourteen inches in Torrington. Thirteen in Winsted. Twelve in Hartford. Nearly twenty inches fell in Westfield, Massachusetts.

  The worst episode was playing out in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, near the Delaware Water Gap. The usually gentle Brodhead Creek rose thirty feet in fifteen minutes, plunging into a religious retreat called Camp Davis, where the campers fled to a house on higher ground. As water rose, they climbed into the second story, then the attic, until the house gave a shudder and collapsed. One woman would recall hearing children screaming h
ysterically as she clung to debris. She would later learn that thirty-one campers were dead.

  Stroudsburg was isolated for ten hours. Across the region, flooding rivers washed away seven bridges. A fleet of helicopters rescued 235 passengers from a stranded Lackawanna Railroad train in the Pocono Mountains. In nearby Milford, two men, tied together by ropes, found an elderly woman stranded in her apartment and carried her to safety.

  President Eisenhower would declare six eastern states disaster areas in need of federal relief. The combined death toll for both storms would climb above two hundred and the damage would be estimated at well over $1.5 billion, the highest on record. But around noon on August 20, the rain began to subside and the rivers grudgingly receded toward normal channels. The flooding failed to spread much father north than Northampton, Massachusetts.

  In Hanover, New Hampshire, where tourists had holed up in motels because routes to the south were flooded or impassable, Emma walked on through town, unaware of the death and chaos spread out behind her.

  She saw a couple of girls playing tennis in a park in town and she asked them if they wanted to go on a hike. The girls didn’t answer and Emma continued down the road. Two blocks later, she heard someone running up behind her. The girls had followed her. They wanted to know if she was the woman hiking from Georgia to Maine who they had heard about.

  Emma told them who she was. She asked if they knew of a place to eat outside town, but they didn’t. One of the girls insisted Emma come home with her to have lunch. Emma thought the girl’s mother might be upset by a surprise guest, but she followed them back to the courts anyway. The mother was somewhat taken aback, but she made the best of it and drove them all home for sandwiches.