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

by Montgomery, Ben

  She learned from the reporter, an older woman herself, that the past few nights, including the night Emma had slept in the open shelter at Jerome Brook, the temperature had fallen well below freezing. Emma wasn’t surprised. The nights had been bitterly cold. But walking and climbing in the mornings had thawed her.

  “It didn’t take me long to warm up,” she said.

  Her photograph ran on the AP wire and was reprinted in newspapers across the country with headlines such as HIKING GRANNY REACHES MAINE, HIKING GALLIPOLIS GRANDMA GETS REST NEAR GOAL, and OHIO GRANDMA NEARING END OF HIKE.

  She walked to where the trail left the small town of Caratunk and then the reporter took her back to a large farmhouse called the Sterling Hotel for the night. Her clothes were wet again, so Emma asked the proprietor if she could dry them by the fire and kitchen stove. Emma made a skirt out of her blanket and spread the clothes out in the heat.

  The next day was brutal as she approached the 100-Mile Wilderness. The trail was horrible with tangles of briers and swamp grass, made worse by the fact that she could barely see with only one lens in her glasses. She still walked hard and she had put in more than fifteen miles before she decided to quit for the day, but shelter was nowhere to be found. A campsite would have to do. The temperature had started to fall. Emma scrambled around collecting enough firewood to keep a flame burning all night. Her blanket and clothes did little to keep the warmth in or the hard cold out. She slept on the ground by the fire, rotating from side to side to keep warm, her breath rising like smoke. Fear kept her awake—not of bears or moose, but of catching herself on fire.

  She rose early and walked ten miles by noon to the village of Blanchard, where an old man sold her breakfast for fifty cents, then she chipped off a few more miles to Monson, the last place to stock up on supplies before the 100-Mile Wilderness. She bought some groceries and tucked in at a motel kept by Sadie Drew in Monson. The walk through the forest was nice the next morning, though all the cabins at Bodfish Farm had been rented. One young couple let Emma stay with them. They served her supper and breakfast and didn’t charge her for the night’s sleep.

  On September 19, her good fortune changed. The trail passed through a region of thick timber and several stretches were clogged with dense berry bushes. They snagged her dungarees and there was no clear path through. She could scarcely keep track of the trail, much less blaze her way through the bushes. She climbed five peaks in the Barren Chairback Range, over rocks and around roots and through gullies and past the old stumps of white birches. Darkness had fallen by the time she walked into the Long Pond Camps, exhausted. A man showed Emma to her cabin and served her supper before she took a quick bath and fell asleep.

  The tote road that carried her to White Cap Mountain was smooth, the walking easy if a bit chilly. From the top, on a clear day, Katahdin can be seen on the horizon, some seventy miles away. But once she got over the 3,654-foot peak, the hike grew miserable. There had been a forest fire. The trail blazes were few and far between. She had to wade through icy water for a section. There were no shelters in sight, so she walked two miles off the trail and got a nice cabin at the West Branch Pond Camps from Robert Tremblay, who owned the place. He brought her back to the trail the next morning and she again fought through a nightmarish and desolate patch of wilderness before stumbling upon the old shambles of a logging camp, which had been abandoned. Most of the buildings looked like they’d fall down with a decent push. She found the one that seemed the safest—or had a roof, at least. Inside, the floor was lined with long wooden benches, where she made a bed.

  She fell the next day, coming down a hillside. It was not a fall that stopped her, but a fall bad enough to sprain her ankle, bruise her eye, and break her glasses, leaving her hobbling nearly blind for the last leg of the trail. She limped into Nahmakanta Lake, though, and hoped the dead red fox she found in front of the lean-to wasn’t an omen that things would get worse. She got two long sticks and carried the carcass far into the woods. When she returned she cleaned the spot where it had been decomposing before bedding down for the night.

  She hiked along the shoreline the next morning and stopped for lunch at the Nahamakanta Lake Camps, then walked blindly the last ten miles to Rainbow Lake, arriving around 4:30 PM. Katahdin jutted from the earth above the tree line on the opposite bank, and the sinking sun lit its peak. As Emma walked into camp, she recognized some of the men she’d met the year before. They were surprised to see her, after the experience last year, but they were ecstatic. They couldn’t believe she’d come all the way from Georgia. One of the men washed Emma’s clothes for her and she dried them on a line in Cabin 5, the same cabin she’d slept in on the last trip. She washed her long, gray hair and dried it, then sat down to supper of meat and vegetables with the men. They treated her like royalty.

  Somehow, the place felt like home.

  P.C. was gone for good, and Emma was changing. Her children noticed that she was happier than they’d ever seen her. She had time to read more, time to garden, time to walk to visit friends, the freedom to travel.

  “I am more than glad to be free of it all,” she wrote in her diary. “Have been happy ever since.”

  Nelson graduated high school in 1941. The only social activity on Barkers Ridge was at the Baptist church, where they had fire-and-brimstone revivals in the summer. The boys, Nelson and Robert, would go to the revivals to try to convince pretty girls to let the boys walk them home. One night, Robert, in his early twenties, was sitting beside a girl and his whispers got a little loud.

  A few days later, he and Nelson were on the farm, playing croquet shirtless and barefoot in the side yard, when a sheriff’s deputy pulled up. He stepped out of the car and approached the boys and said he had a warrant from Robert’s arrest. He said Robert had been disturbing the peace in church.

  The boys stood there, white-faced, before Robert spoke up.

  Well, let me go in the house and put on some clothes, he said. The deputy nodded and Robert walked inside.

  Nelson talked to the deputy a while and collected the croquet set and put it in the garage, which had cracks between the wall slats. On his second trip in, he peered through the slats and saw Robert running down over the hill. He’d climbed out the back window.

  Nelson didn’t say anything to the deputy. They stood around a few more minutes.

  It’s taking him an awfully long time to put some clothes on, the deputy said. Go on in there and check and see when he’s going to be ready.

  Nelson followed his orders. He spent about five minutes inside and came back out.

  Well, I went to every room in the house, and I can’t find him, Nelson said. Don’t know where he is.

  Around midnight, Robert came back to the house.

  Can I borrow your bike? he asked his younger brother. I’m going to ride it to Monroe’s.

  He left the bike in Gallipolis, at least thirty miles away. The next thing anybody heard, Robert was a soldier in the US Army.

  Nelson went to work on a dairy farm in Mechanicsville, Ohio— labor so hard you could’ve wrung sweat out of his belt. When he turned eighteen, on December 28, 1941, he took a job with the telephone company and worked there a year before he, too, signed up for war. They put him on a train in Dayton, to Cincinnati, on to Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana, where he got shots and a haircut and even pulled KP duty before the sun had set on his first day as a soldier.

  Before the war was over, Robert would be shot down over Munich and spend a year and a half in a German prisoner of war camp. People would whisper about how gaunt and pale he was when he came back to Ohio, a hero. Nelson, a paratrooper, would take a bullet to the thigh on Corregidor Island in the Philippines, recover, and get set to jump again when the war was called off.

  “They were tough, that family,” their cousin, Tommy Jones, would say years later. “Every last one of them.”

  As soon as Emma could, she sold the farm on Barkers Ridge and in 1944 moved back to Ohio, to Chesapeake, just
across the river from Huntington, West Virginia. Louise went off to Marshall College while Lucy, the youngest, finished high school. Emma enrolled her in business school at Bliss College in Columbus, then bought a house in Rutland, Ohio, north of Gallipolis, on the Appalachian Plateau.

  With nothing tying her down, Emma began to relocate frequently. She went to Pittsburgh and worked nine weeks, came back to Rutland to rent the house, then went to Dayton to work in a private boarding school for three months. In 1945, she moved back to Rutland and began renovating the home. She changed the cellar stairs, cut a doorway, installed banisters on the front porch, tore down an old fence, chopped down trees, demolished an old barn, and built a rock garden. Between projects she read and wrote poetry about nature, about God, about men, about tugboat landings and swimming holes and naughty birds and her new stage in life.

  My home I scrubbed and painted,

  Until I nearly fainted,

  Just for the lack of pelf,

  All by myself.

  She self-published a collection that she distributed with great humility to friends and members of her family.

  In 1949, Louise had a baby, Barbara, and needed help, so Emma moved back to Gallipolis. The next year, Emma and Louise bought a house together at 556 Fourth Avenue. They got along well. Emma read the newspaper every day and paid attention to local politics, often opining on the news—with sharp wit—in letters to the editor. On June 12, 1951, she sent this:

  Dear Editor: I was going to write and get in my three cents worth of opinion about how negligent the school board has been about making more room in our overfull schools, but decided not to disturb them in their lethargy.

  Instead I will give my version of what goes on with the peas in our gardens after they come up. I only have to say the rabbits ate my peas to get an argument started. Most everyone around here that has tried to raise peas say “the birds ate them off.”

  My peas have vanished in the past quite a few times. One time when they were being eaten I put a chicken wire fence around the rows, and they were not bothered again. Anyone should know a fence will not keep out the birds. Another time when the peas were three or four inches tall they were eaten off clean, half way of the rows in a day or two. There happened to be a family of rabbits living in my garden at the time. Last year there were two rabbits lived in and around my garden and the peas were eaten. This year our garden is back of the athletic field fence and the holes were stopped to keep out the rabbits, which lived just on the other side. One could see them each morning out getting their breakfast, but the peas were not bothered.

  Someone will have to show me a bird eating peas before I will believe. There has been robins, starlings, English sparrows and other sparrows, the tanager, blue bird, doves, blackbirds, gold finches, cat birds, yellow hammers, wood thrush, and indigo buntings, and not one of them have ever been seen to peek anything but bugs and worms in the garden.

  Rabbits will also cut off the rose bushes as with a knife. I will venture to say that there are more rabbits in this town than in the same area in the country around. I do know that I can tramp the hills over and never see one rabbit, but see them here quite often. Build a good fence and raise peas or get rid of the rabbits and raise them.

  —Emma Gatewood.

  Louise got married in 1951, deeding her part of the house to her mother, and left Emma, for the first time in three decades, alone. All of her eleven children were on their own.

  Emma would bounce around the next few years working menial jobs or caring for ailing relatives, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Owensboro, Kentucky, and Miller, Ohio. But after Louise left, in 1951, Emma rented the house and went to work for five months at the county hospital in Columbus, where she likely first saw the National Geographic story about the Appalachian Trail, the one that promised the long path had been “planned for the enjoyment of anyone in normal good health” and “doesn’t demand special skill or training to traverse” and gave the following scant advice to those considering a long hike:

  Exercise caution over rough or steep parts.

  Wear clothing suitable to the latitude, elevation, and time of year.

  Plan where to pitch your tent, or find other shelter along the way.

  Carry enough food, or know where meals may be had.

  For an extended A.T. trip, thorough preparation should be made. The condition of Trail stretches to be traversed should be carefully checked.

  Like the five reported thru-hikers before her and the thousands who would follow, she hadn’t been able to get the trail out of her head. In July 1954, she flew to Maine and started south from the summit of Mount Katahdin and got lost and very nearly couldn’t find her way out of the wilderness.

  Go home, grandma, one of the rescuers had told her.

  But she was back.

  The men told Emma to wait at Rainbow Lake so they could summon a warden to meet her at the west branch of the Penobscot River to ferry her across. She waited around until 9:00 AM, then headed east past Little Hurd Pond and Pitman Pond, walking about ten miles before noon. When she got to the river, no one was there to meet her. She climbed atop a large rock above the logging road to sit and eat her lunch.

  Two thousand miles west, in Denver, Colorado, unbeknownst to most of the American public, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was nearly dead. The former four-pack-a-day smoker, on vacation in Denver, had played a round of golf the day before, then joined his wife and doctor for dinner, where he complained of stomach pains, which became worse as the evening turned to morning. The man whose legacy would be the Interstate Highway System had suffered a heart attack at the age of sixty-four, which would stick him on the eighth floor of Fitzsimmons Army Hospital for seven weeks and keep the nation on edge into the following year.

  Back on the Appalachian Trail, the woman who had never had so much as a cold wasn’t on her rock long before she saw dust plumes trailing two cars headed her direction.

  The warden climbed out of one. Mary Snow from Sports Illustrated and Mrs. Dean Chase from the United Press in nearby Millinocket came out of the other. Emma looked worn out. Her eye was still bruised, but she seemed to be in good spirits. After the greetings, they climbed in the cars and drove a mile or so to a canoe launch. The warden pulled a boat off the top of his vehicle and slid it into the freezing water as the women talked. Mrs. Chase snapped a few photographs as Emma, the warden, and Mary Snow piled into the vessel and started for the other side. The warden had affixed a small motor on the boat and they were across in no time.

  Mrs. Chase took the car around and was instructed to meet them at the campground near Katahdin. Emma and Mary Snow stepped ashore, thanked the warden, and began their hike together on a path alongside the Penobscot River. They talked as they walked. So much had happened since they had first met on Bear Mountain. Emma told her about the wind atop Mount Washington, about wading the hurricane-swollen creek with the navy boys, about having to push her sack through the holes in Mahoosuc Notch, about fashioning a discarded piece of rubber into an arch support. She told Snow about using a fork she found at a campsite to comb her hair. She told her about measuring distances between stepping stones in a swift-moving stream with her walking stick because of her broken glasses.

  I couldn’t see so good, Emma said.

  Snow asked her where she had been sleeping.

  Anywhere I could lay my bones, Emma said. Front porch swings. Picnic tables. Lean-tos. Logging camps.

  What about animals? Snow asked.

  Most people get scared when they come up against an animal, said Emma, and right away think they have to make a fight out of it. Animals won’t attack you unless you corner them. Fiddlesticks, I never even saw a bear. I made so much racket crashing and thumping through the woods.

  By the time the two arrived at York’s sporting camps, it had begun to rain. Snow asked to use the telephone and called the Katahdin Stream Campground where Mrs. Chase was waiting, and asked Chase to come pick her up at York’s camps. They talked some mor
e while they waited.

  Snow wondered about Emma’s general impressions of the trail. Did it meet her expectations?

  I read about this trail three years ago in a magazine and the article told about the beautiful trail, how well marked it was, that it was cleared out and that there were shelters at the end of a good day’s hike, Emma said. I thought it would be a nice lark. It wasn’t. There were terrible blowdowns, burnt-over areas that were never re-marked, gravel and sand washouts, weeds and brush to your neck, and most of the shelters were blown down, burned down, or so filthy I chose to sleep out of doors. This is no trail. This is a nightmare. For some fool reason they always lead you right up over the biggest rock to the top of the biggest mountain they can find. I’ve seen every fire station between here and Georgia. Why, an Indian would die laughing his head off if he saw those trails. I would never have started this trip if I had known how tough it was, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t quit.

  When Mrs. Chase arrived, Emma said good-bye and walked the rest of the way to the Katahdin Stream Campground in the rain. She registered for a cabin. The warden built a fire in the stove for her and brought her a lamp. Mary Snow and Mrs. Chase arrived by car as the evening cold began to set in. The warden brought some extra blankets and the women talked a little more before Snow gave Emma the balance of her lunch, and Snow and Chase climbed in the car and headed back to civilization in Millinocket.

  Emma walked back to the warden’s office and paid him for her cabin. On the walk back, she stopped at the different lean-tos, where fires lit the faces of campers, and chatted, telling her stories to the surprised and curious outdoorsmen. At the base of that mile-high mountain, on the 144th day of her journey, she felt important.

  If the trail was a book, she was about to start the last chapter.

  16

  RETURN TO RAINBOW LAKE

  SEPTEMBER 25, 2012

  We woke in the dark at Katahdin Stream campground. I can’t say woke, really, because it felt like I’d been awake all night, the kind of uncomfortable sleep that never fully sucks you in but instead keeps you right on the edge of consciousness. The pain was in my lower back, mostly, but it wouldn’t be right to complain about spending a single night on the hard slats of a lean-to.