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

by Montgomery, Ben

  “What is it with old people and mountains?” he asked.

  That’s a fine question.

  At Katahdin’s summit, we found a surprise.

  Several hikers had passed us on the climb, but we never expected to find a crowd. There were perhaps thirty-five hikers at the summit, and most of them were thru-hikers who had reached their final destination. Young and old and bearded and smelly. A group of them who had met and become friends on their long journey were cracking Budweisers and passing a joint. They had affixed a video recorder to the end of a walking stick and they were filming themselves, digital memories of the end of their nature hike. They spoke in a sort of trail code, which lent the scene a certain exclusivity, like a party you could get into only if you knew the secret knock. A young man with a big red bushy beard climbed atop the wooden KATAHDIN sign and balanced in a crow yoga pose as the rest of them laughed. There were at least two marriage proposals. Both couples had first met on the trail.

  In 2012, Appalachian Trail Conservancy records show, twenty-five hundred thru-hikers started in Georgia. Fewer than half— 1,012—logged in at Harpers Ferry, the psychological halfway point. One in five reported making it to Mount Katahdin. I sat on a rock and watched as even more pilgrims made their way to the sign. Their euphoria was contagious and almost moved me to tears. A gray-haired couple, slower and calmer than the rest, touched the sign and then embraced. They were both crying.

  “You know it has to be this hard,” the woman said. “It has to be.”

  Even though the A.T. has become better maintained and more crowded over the years, finishing a thru-hike remains a remarkable achievement. More than eleven thousand people have hiked all two-thousand-plus miles, many in sections. But among thru-hikers, on average, three out of four who start never finish, according to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. The number of two-thousand-milers, as they’re called, has been on the rise in recent years, growing from 562 in 2005 to 704 in 2011.

  Those numbers would have seemed preposterous to the trail’s planners and early organizers. In the 1930s, just five people reported hiking the entire trail, all of them in sections. (The trail was completed in 1937.) Only three finished in the 1940s—Earl Shaffer was the lone thru-hiker—a period during which the trail was again incomplete or unconnected in places. In the 1950s, when Emma came along, just fourteen reported two-thousand-mile hikes.

  Then the numbers started to climb. The number of completions more than doubled in the 1960s: thirty-seven people logged in. Nearly eight hundred hiked all the way in the 1970s. The 1980s saw 1,420 completions. The 1990s: 3,301. The 2000s: 5,876.

  Among the ranks of two-thousand-milers are two six-year-old boys, an eighty-one-year-old man, an eighty-year-old woman, a blind man, barefoot sisters, a cat, and a woman who, in 2011, reportedly completed the entire trail in forty-six days, eleven hours, and twenty minutes, the fastest-ever unofficial time.

  And as peaceful as it may seem, thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail can drip with controversy. It started with the legend himself: Earl Shaffer. The A.T.C. was skeptical of his claim until he showed hundreds of slides and gave a vast description of his trip. Over the years, Shaffer became the skeptic, writing of his suspicions that other early thru-hikers, including Grandma Gatewood, may have taken shortcuts.

  In the mid-1990s, an elderly gentleman named Max Gordon told the Appalachian Trailway News that he and five other teenage Boy Scouts from the Bronx had thru-hiked the trail in 1936, which, if true, would have made Earl Shaffer the seventh thru-hiker instead of the first. The man had solid recall of certain experiences along the trail, but other sections were blurry gaps in his memory. He could remember the names of just two of the other Scouts, and both were dead. He told the publication that he never knew the hike was important until he received a mailer from the A.T.C. in his old age and decided to bring it to someone’s attention.

  Even without supporting evidence, the Appalachian Long Distance Hikers Association in 2000 adjusted its list of the first two-thousand-milers, and Earl Shaffer called for a reexamination. However, it was Shaffer’s record that was again called into question, in 2011. A West Virginia lawyer and backpacker named Jim McNeely had been poring through Shaffer’s old notebook, which had been turned over to the Smithsonian Institution upon Shaffer’s death in 2002. The lawyer was trying to piece together the path of the old A.T., as it was in Shaffer’s day, when he discovered that Shaffer had bypassed 170 miles of trail, taking shortcuts, accepting rides in cars, and walking on roads. McNeely, a former prosecutor, published an unbelievably detailed, nineteen-chapter, 164-page report that painted Shaffer as a fraud and hypocrite.

  Presented with solid evidence that Shaffer had at least misrepresented his hike in revisions, the A.T.C. and the Appalachian Trail Museum took an interesting stance. Basically, We’re not in the detective business. Shaffer’s place in history stands as the first reported thru-hike.

  The hiking community went nuts, dividing into two camps: the “purists” or “whiteblazers,” who believe you must walk by every single white blaze—and if you miss one, you return to where you missed it; and the “hike your own hike” group, which tends to be less austere about rules on a spiritual walk from Georgia to Maine.

  The two sides could argue for days about what constitutes a thru-hike, which is testament, ultimately, to their love for the trail, their love for this experience.

  The joy at the top of Katahdin was palpable, for good reason. It felt wrong for me to intrude on their blissful and sacred moment, but I awkwardly approached the group and asked if they were familiar with Grandma Gatewood. They all nodded.

  “Gotta have respect for someone who hiked the trail barefoot,” a man said.

  I didn’t correct him. Her legend had evidently blossomed. I had heard some wild tales as well, growing up, from my mother. One has Emma scaring away a black bear with an umbrella.

  Atop the mountain that day, I didn’t talk to a single person who wasn’t at least vaguely aware of Emma’s accomplishments. What’s more, many of them had been inspired by her, all these years later.

  “When it got hard, I’d think about her,” one of the hikers said. “I’d think, ‘She did it. I can, too.’”

  Emma Gatewood reached the summit at Baxter Peak without ceremony before noon on September 25, 1955, twenty-six days before her sixty-eighth birthday, having hiked 2,050 miles through thirteen states, from Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia to the highest point on Mount Katahdin in Maine, the spot where the very first rays of morning sunshine touch the United States.

  She planted her seventh pair of tennis shoes on the rocky top of the precipice, alone. Physically, even in her bulky red mackinaw, she was a shadow of the woman who had started walking 146 days before. She had lost thirty pounds. Her glasses were broken; her knee was sore. She wore the clothes of an immigrant to her altar in the sky and spoke aloud to an invisible audience.

  I did it, she said. I said I’d do it and I’ve done it.

  The sign planted in a rock cairn at the top said:

  KATAHDIN

  NORTHERN TERMINUS OF

  THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL,

  A MOUNTAIN FOOTPATH

  EXTENDING 2050 MILES TO

  MT. OGLETHORPE, GEORGIA

  As the wind beat against her cheeks, Emma sang the first verse of “America the Beautiful,” words that had come to a different woman in 1893, as she looked down from Pikes Peak.

  O beautiful for spacious skies,

  For amber waves of grain,

  For purple mountain majesties

  Above the fruited plain!

  A storm began moving onto the mountain and she didn’t want to be trapped. She began to sign the register when a gust of wind caught her and nearly blew her down. She regained her balance. Then the sun peeked through the clouds for just a moment, like a wink, as though the heavens were acknowledging her presence.

  17

  ALONENESS MORE COMPLETE THAN EVER

  SEPTEMBER 26-OCTOBER 9, 1955

>   She was a portrait of proper. Her iron-gray hair was clean and combed and pulled back. She wore a soft white blouse, red rayon suit, and medium-heeled black shoes.

  “I decided to look a bit more presentable on the way back,” Emma told Mrs. Dean Chase, the reporter with the United Press. “You know, it feels kind of good to get back into civilized clothes.”

  She was the talk of the country. The headlines ran in newspapers everywhere.

  MRS. GATEWOOD COMPLETES HIKE

  GRANDMA PLANS NEW YORK VISIT AS HIKE ENDS

  GRANNY TIRED

  Earl Shaffer’s hike had prompted a few newspaper stories and the article in the National Geographic that inspired Emma. Gene Espy’s hike a year later made local papers. The attention Emma received was unprecedented.

  “A jovial little grandmother who lost 30 pounds in her trek along the Appalachian Trail said today that she has had ‘all the walking I’ve wanted for a long time,’” read a story in the Baltimore Sun. “New Hampshire, she said, was the toughest part of the journey. Maine offered a few serious obstacles where there were ‘blow-downs’ of trees along the trail. Several times Mrs. Gatewood fell and strained an ankle or knee, slowing her. There has been frost every morning of the last week but Mrs. Gatewood said she found shelter and at least one good meal daily at sportsmen’s camps. There is a little snow on the mountain.”

  She was called “sprightly,” “robust,” “doughty,” “determined,” “straight-laced and old-fashioned,” “strong,” “frail-looking,” and, surprisingly, “tall.” According to the journalists, she reported feeling in “tip-top shape” and ready to walk “another thousand miles.” She was in a good mood, she said, because this was the first morning that she “didn’t get up at 6 o’clock and have to climb a mountain.” She calculated that she had spent about two hundred dollars on the trail, roughly ten cents a mile.

  She sent her glasses with Mary Snow to have them fixed and fitted with new lenses. The president of the Millinocket Chamber of Commerce gave her a tour of the nearby paper mill and treated her to lunch at the Great Northern Hotel. That afternoon, he drove her back to the chamber, where a group of businessmen and dignitaries had gathered. They presented Emma with a large picture of Mount Katahdin.

  She posed for photographs in a potato field and fetched her repaired glasses from the ophthalmologist and ate a steak dinner with Mary Snow on the train to Bangor, courtesy of the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad, where she scratched out a postcard, addressed it to a Roman Catholic parish in Harlem and dropped it in the mail, still unaware that she’d stayed the night with the leaders of two rival street gangs.

  “I made it!” she wrote. “Remember me to all those young men I owe my life to. Please tell them they are welcome to come visit me anytime, as also are you. Love, Emma.”

  Over the next few days, Mary Snow gave Emma a tour of New York City, of the Empire State Building, Chinatown, and the wharf, as swarms of urbanites buzzed around them. It was a city she had only known before through the newspaper columns of Gallipolis’s native son O. O. McIntyre. He called his daily dispatch “the letter,” and his stories often had the feel of a postcard to the folks back home. He wrote of the telescope man on the curb, the Bowery lodging houses, the drifters, chorus girls, gunmen, the speakeasies on side streets, fake jewelry auction sales, chop houses, antique shops, cafeterias. Now Emma took it all in with her own eyes.

  When it was time for her to go, Snow drove her to LaGuardia Airport and put her on a plane for home. She was carrying her walking stick, as always, and as she boarded the plane, the other passengers and crew kept trying to assist her, as if she were crippled.

  Going back to the rolling hills of southern Ohio was like a victory tour, as Emma visited family, received phone calls from well-wishing friends, met her seven-month-old great-grandchild for the first time, and gave interviews to the reporters who had learned of her return. She said the people she had met along the trail were “extry nice”—all but the snooty woman who turned her away and the boy who called her a lady tramp.

  “I thought it would be fun to walk the trail but I soon found that it was anything but that,” she told one reporter. She explained how she had blown through seven pairs of shoes—four cloth-topped, two made of leather, the last a pair of sneakers—and used a total of five rolls of adhesive tape, mostly for ankle support. She mentioned how bad the bugs were and explained how she had fixed sassafras leaves in the band of her sunshade, dangling over her ears, to keep the pests off.

  “I didn’t get started sooner,” she said, “because when you’re raising a family of 11, you can’t just run off when you want to…. I got to the point where I had time, and I decided, ‘That’ll be a nice lark for me.’”

  When a reporter from Baltimore called her a celebrity, she responded: “I wish you people’d stop calling me names.”

  Was she afraid?

  “If I’d been afraid,” she said, “I never would have started out in the first place.”

  It was as though she was made for the moment.

  “I slept wherever I could pile down,” she told the local paper. “Course, sometimes they weren’t the most desirable places in the world, but I always managed. A pile of leaves makes a fine bed, and if you’re tired enough, mountain tops, abandoned sheds, porches, and overturned boats can be tolerated. I even had a sleeping companion. A porcupine tried to curl up next to me one night while I slept on a cabin floor. I decided there wasn’t room for both of us.

  “Though there were a lot of times I had to parcel out my food to make it last, I didn’t have to break any laws to get it. And when it didn’t last—well, I’ve eaten many a wild berry and chewed on many a sassafras, wintergreen, peppermint, and spearmint leaf.

  “What the Lord didn’t provide, I did. One day I was walking down the road and came upon a tin can. I turned it over a couple times with the tip of my cane and found a full, unopened can of beef stew. Opened it with my knife, and dined real well that night.”

  She said the trip was the most valuable summer of her life.

  “It took me a long time to get to the top,” she said, “and when I did and signed my named on the register, I never felt so alone in my life.”

  The grown-up Gatewood children were alarmingly unsurprised that their mother had spent nearly five months in the woods, with rattlesnakes and street gangs, on a mile-high mountain with a sprained ankle and broken glasses. Maybe it’s their stock.

  “We didn’t worry about her because she always took care of herself,” Lucy told me, “and she taught us to take care of ourselves.”

  “I didn’t know where she was or what she was doing,” said Nelson, “and that was normal.”

  “Some people say, ‘Weren’t you worried?’” said Louise. “I said, ‘No, we weren’t worried.’ She knew what she was doing. And if that’s what she wanted to do, more power to her.”

  “She was just a normal person,” said Nelson. “Nothing extra.”

  “We didn’t know that she had become a kind of celebrity until later,” said Rowena.

  “When she came off the trail, she called from Huntington, West Virginia,” said Charles Gatewood, Monroe’s son and Emma’s grandson. “She said, ‘Come get me.’ Dad said, ‘You’ve walked all that way, surely you could walk the rest of the way to Gallipolis.”

  “You know, it wasn’t that impressive to me, when she walked the Appalachian Trail the first time,” said their cousin, Tommy Jones, who still lives in the family’s old homestead on the Ohio River. “I think she was sixty-seven, right? Well, I knew how strong she was physically, and how she liked outdoors living. So for her, I didn’t think that was anything exceptional.”

  Maybe she didn’t either.

  Her celebrity rising, Emma was quickly summoned back to New York to appear on NBC’s Today with Dave Garroway, where she was the featured guest. She walked in range of the cameras from a side door, wearing blue jeans, a checkered jacket, and tennis shoes, and she carried her old sack. In place of her
eyeshade she wore a dark beret. She told Garroway and a nationwide audience that she could have walked another thousand miles beyond Katahdin “if necessary.” Garroway asked her why she made the long walk. She said she had always strolled through the hills for pleasure, and when she read the roseate magazine story, she just decided she’d try it.

  Afterward, she went to the Empire Hotel to try out for Welcome Travelers, a confessional quiz show hosted by “Smilin’” Jack Smith. She earned a spot and they filmed the show the following morning, after several rehearsals. Emma won two hundred dollars—exactly what she spent on the trail. She caught a ride on a sightseeing bus around New York and stopped at an antique shop to buy Mrs. Dean Chase of Millinocket a brass ashtray in the shape of a shoe.

  Her next stop was Pittsburgh to visit her daughters, Rowena and Esther. She had barely touched down when the newspapers started calling. A reporter for the Pittsburgh Press asked her about her plans for the future.

  “That’s a secret,” she said. “But if I go for another hike I’ll let my family know like I did the last time—with postcards.”

  She told them all the same thing. “Nobody,” she said, “is going to get out of me what’s going through my head on that score.”

  She wouldn’t say so, but she was already thinking about the trail again.

  On June 25, 1956, in Washington, DC, the US House of Representatives convened to handle a slate of important business, including the scheduling of a discussion of a postal rate increase and to amend the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949. Ohio Rep. Thomas A. Jenkins, a Republican from Ironton, addressed Democratic Speaker of the House John William McCormack.

  “Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to extend my remarks at this point in the record,” he said.

  “Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from Ohio?” McCormack asked. There wasn’t.

  “Mr. Speaker,” Jenkins began,