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

by Montgomery, Ben

  “My legs go mechanical-like,” she told one reporter. “When someone stops me, I have to make an effort to get them going again.”

  Emma mailed a letter to Lucy in Columbus on July 27, when she arrived in Meacham, Oregon. “Things are getting quite exciting for me,” she wrote.

  I went to a rodeo … where there was ten thousand fans and was introduced over the loudspeaker and stood up and waved with the floodlights on me. When I came to a two-lane bridge several hundred feet long across the Snake River, the Highway Patrol held up the traffic one way while I walked across. I felt like Royalty. The Patrol are keeping close watch to see that I do not come to harm. A man from the Centennial Staff met me on the highway and gave me a pass and said I would have a car with chauffeur to use, get all the clothes I needed, have a hotel with all expenses paid, and one day of the Centennial would be proclaimed Emma or Grandma Gatewood day. From what I hear from there, there will be other favors. I am a little excited but not losing any sleep over it. I wish you could be here to enjoy it with me. I have 250 miles to go yet. Folks are doing everything for me. They came to help me have a pleasant trip. Things are very pretty here. After all the treeless country, they surely look good. I will get to Pendleton tomorrow and will soon be going down the Columbia River, which I am told is very beautiful. I was given a dress, shoes, and suitcase at Baker and they have been sent by the Chamber of Commerce on to Portland. I will be getting mail in Portland addressed General Delivery if you want to write. Hoping all is fine there. I am, with love, Mamma.

  Large groups in Oregon anticipating her arrival began to gather roadside and cheer her through. Even the trainman on a passing caboose waved and asked her if she wanted a ride.

  Her patience was tested when she began to be badgered by people who wanted to take her picture and ask her the same set of questions. The attention had begun to grate, and by the end her emotions were ragged. She told one reporter that she felt like a “sideshow freak.” She began to approach crowds with her head bowed and a handkerchief covering part of her face.

  West of Meacham, near La Grande, a bevy of motorists stopped her beside the road, but as they snapped pictures and rattled off a flurry of questions, she simply walked away. Farther west, outside The Dalles, she threw stones at a pesky newsman. Near Hood River, a few days before she got to Portland, a young photographer approached her and squatted to take her picture. She swung her umbrella and struck him on the forehead, leaving a big red welt and drawing blood. In the articles that ran the next day, Emma was called “peppery” and the photographer was quoted saying she “hit like a mule.”

  “She let me have it,” the photographer, Robert Hall, told reporters. “But when she saw the blood on my face, she cried and said she felt awful. I told her all was forgotten.”

  Someone brought her a lawn chair, a hamburger, and a glass of ice water, and she calmed down. She even hugged Robert Hall. All was forgiven.

  Now, on August 7, nearly two thousand miles from where she started, she walked the last short stretch into Portland at a clip that had the Centennial greeters, news reporters, and other well-wishers gasping for breath. The city was buzzing. Portland politicians had declared it Grandma Gatewood Day and boosters had greeted her with flowers at the city line. Police had blocked off a lane of traffic to allow Emma, and the hundreds now walking with her, safe passage. The traffic jam, according to a reporter for the Oregonian, was unprecedented.

  When Emma reached the ribbon, she was overcome with tears. She brushed it apart and fell into the arms of a stranger and wept. She seemed shaken by it all, particularly the crowds. She climbed into a police car with Capt. John Pittenger to get away from the crush for a few minutes. When she had regained her composure, she returned to the intersection and got into the back of a red Oldsmobile convertible and, beaming, rode off in a motorcade toward the exposition grounds.

  “Who do they think I am?” she asked the mayor of Portland. “Queen Elizabeth?”

  She showered and traded in her faded and torn cotton blouse and skirt for a donated dress, an Evelyn Gibson French blue crepe with a pale pink Alençon lace yoke and matching jacket. She donned a blue hat and white gloves and carried a new purse. The outfit was provided for free, as was a lunch of salad, crab cocktail, and well-done roast beef, which she ate with the mayor and police chief. Emma took one shoe off while they ate, but nobody seemed to mind. Her old clothes and the umbrella were taken for an exhibit at the museum of history.

  Presents poured in from all corners. She was given the key to Portland. Someone donated a new umbrella. Someone else a watch. She accepted a corsage and gold plaque from the East Broadway Boosters. She got a big basket of fruit from the Hollywood Boosters, then took a ride over the city in a bright yellow helicopter. As she climbed off the helicopter, a woman approached to take her picture and Emma knocked the camera to the ground and immediately felt bad. She apologized dramatically, saying she was still vexed by the great hordes of people who wanted her picture.

  The city of Portland put her up at the luxurious Hotel Benson, where she was pampered. Overwhelmed as she was, she seemed pleased by all the attention. She was invited to Hollywood and hammed it up on Art Linkletter’s House Party. She was alternatively the guest of the Oregon Centennial Commission, the Oregon Coast Association, and others who showed her around the state. They drove her to the coast where a group of colorfully dressed Coos Bay Pirates surprised her and presented her with a scarf. She was whisked to Medford, waded in the Pacific at Seaside, piloted a fifty-two-foot Coast Guard rescue boat near Newport, fished for salmon at Gold Beach, and road the mail boat to Agness. Nearly everywhere she went she got a key to the city. A month later, when it was time to leave, the bus company gave her an open ticket, fixed so she could stop anywhere along the line through Seattle, Spokane, Glacier National Park, Winnipeg, Chicago, Detroit, Columbus, and Gallipolis.

  She was everyone’s grandma now.

  At the end of the year, when the United Press in Oregon put together its list of the biggest news of 1959, it included stories about the Portland newspaper strike, the collision of two jets over Mount Hood, the successful separation of Siamese twins, the discovery of two bodies in the Columbia River, and the kidnapping of the Harrisburg police chief. At number two on the list, just below a story about the combustion of a truck laden with six tons of explosives in downtown Roseburg that killed thirteen citizens and caused ten million dollars in damage, was the Oregon Centennial and the following line: “An Ohio grandmother, Mrs. Emma Gatewood, hiked on foot all the way to Portland.”

  In November 1959, two months after she’d headed for home, Emma was invited back to the NBC Studios in Hollywood to be a special guest on Groucho Marx’s television quiz show You Bet Your Life alongside author Max Shulman, who wrote the Dobie Gillis stories and had just released a Dobie Gillis novel called I Was a Teen-Age Dwarf. In an episode that aired the following January, Emma appeared from behind a wall and walked sheepishly across the stage as the audience politely clapped. She wore a pearl choker, dark medium-heeled shoes, a plain dress, and a short jacket. Her thick glasses magnified her eyes. She reached out and shook Marx’s hand.

  “Emma, I’m delighted to meet you,” he said. “And Max, of course I’ve known you for some time. Now, where are you from, Emma?”

  “Gallipolis, Ohio,” she says.

  “Gallipolis, Ohio?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t there a famous writer who came from there?”

  “McIntyre,” she said.

  “O. O. McIntyre, yeah,” Groucho said. “See what a memory I have for trivia?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “He was a very good columnist in his day. He always talked about Gallipolis, but I notice he lived in New York,” Groucho said as the audience giggled. “He was always talking about Gallipolis. Were you born on a farm, Emma?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “Why was this?” he said. “I mean, what did your folks raise on the farm in addition to you?”
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  “Tobacco, corn, wheat, and a little Cain,” she said, smiling slyly.

  “A little Cain?” Groucho said.

  Emma giggled.

  “How big a family did he raise, Emma?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Fifteen? Well he must’ve raised quite some Cain.”

  She laughed with her lips sealed, like she was trying to hide her teeth.

  “You think fifteen children in one family is a good idea?” Groucho said. “Would you recommend it—”

  “No.”

  “—to other parents?”

  “No,” she said. “That’s too many. They can’t take proper care of ’em.”

  “Do you have children?”

  “I have eleven,” Emma said.

  “In other words, you don’t subscribe to your own philosophy, do you?” Groucho asked, looking sideways at the audience.

  Groucho turned to Shulman.

  “There’s one thing in your book that I find extremely interesting, Max. You say that our society has developed a matriarchy. Would you explain this in detail for Emma here?”

  “Oh, certainly,” Shulman said. “I’d be happy to. This is a country run by women, without question.”

  “You’ll get no argument out of me,” Groucho said.

  “When you and I were boys, when Dad came home at night, no matter how hard he’d been working during the day, he could depend on it that Mama was more tired than he, because she had been baking bread and scrubbing clothes by hand and making soap and cooking dinner. But today, with automatic washers and driers and store bread and TV dinners and power steering, he comes home at night, he’s just dragging himself into the house and she looks as though she’s spent a month in the country. She’s full of plans. She says, ‘Dear, don’t you think we ought to flood the study and make an aquarium out of it?’ Or, ‘Don’t you think we ought to put another set of braces on Peter’s teeth?’ You know, things like that. Now this poor tired man lying there says, ‘You decide, honey.’ Well, you give a woman power like that and she’s bound to achieve the size to go with it.”

  “There’s no doubt about this,” Groucho said. “The women are in the driver’s seat.”

  “But I must say, I don’t think women like it that way,” said Shulman.

  “I don’t think so either. I think they’re very insecure,” Groucho said.

  “They would prefer the men to run the home and the country,” Shulman said.

  “But the men have relinquished.”

  “That’s right.”

  “They have capitulated.”

  “The women have gotten it by default.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So nobody’s happy,” Shulman said. “The men don’t want it. The women don’t want it. And the kids don’t know who their fathers are.”

  At this the audience laughed.

  “Now, Emma, what about you?” Groucho said. “You’ve been listening to this sophomoric conversation here. Do you think it’s a good idea for the wife to run the family?”

  Emma closed her eyes and paused for a second or two.

  “Nope.”

  “Well, Emma, now that your children are grown, what do you do for excitement?”

  “Oh, I hike,” she said.

  “You hike?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean you just keep walking. What kind of walking do you do?”

  “I walked the Oregon Trail.”

  “The Oregon Trail? You walked it?” he said.

  “Yes, I walked it.”

  “You mean like Lewis and Clark?”

  “Yes.”

  “When was this?”

  “This year.”

  “You walked the Oregon Trail this year,” Groucho said. “How did you arrive at that kind of a pastime?”

  “Oh, I didn’t have anything else to do,” she said. “The family is all married and gone and I just wanted to do something.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Seventy-two.”

  “Seventy-two? And how long was this trip that you …”

  “Two thousand miles.”

  Gasps spread across the room. One person in the audience began clapping. More joined in and the applause rose. Emma’s expression was blank. She looked at the ground and swayed just a little.

  “What were you walking for?” Groucho asked.

  “Well, I like to walk …”

  “When you got to the other end, what happened? Did you turn around and walk back again?”

  “No. This year I walked up to the Centennial, up to Portland.”

  “From where?”

  “Independence, Missouri.”

  “Oh, my,” said a woman in the audience. A man whistled and another began to clap. A low chatter commenced and you could picture the audience turning to each other mid-gasp, awed by this woman who now had a small smile on her lips.

  Back home in Gallia County, Emma collected a few paw-paw seeds and buckeyes and put them in a pouch with a card addressed for Portland Mayor Terry Schrunk. She wrote that she enjoyed her visit. Alas, like many settlers before, she wrote, “My family are all here and I supposed I will remain here.”

  Well. Sort of. Home was more like home base.

  20

  BLAZING

  1960–1968

  “She’s sitting right over there.” The bus terminal manager pointed across the room, toward the thick Thursday afternoon crowd. “The lady in the blue coat.”

  The reporter walked through the bus station, toward the seventy-two-year-old woman wearing white gloves, a white blouse, thick glasses, and a winter hat to keep her ears warm against the February cold. She seemed impatient. She’d been sitting a while. The reporter introduced himself.

  “If that bus doesn’t come soon,” she said, “I’m going to walk to Dayton.”

  Emma was in Chillicothe, Ohio, trying to catch a ride. She had to be in Cincinnati by Saturday and wanted to visit her son, Nelson, before then.

  The reporter asked the standard questions, the ones she’d answered a thousand times. Why do you hike? Why do you hike alone? How do you survive in the wild? She told him she’d been named a lifetime member of the National Campers and Hikers Association and that she was working on establishing hiking trails through the Ohio hills. A few months before, the executive committee of a nonprofit called Buckeye Trail, Inc., of which she was a charter member, had received permission from the state to begin marking a trail from Lake Erie south through the Zaleski State Forest and on to Cincinnati. The blazing was expected to take four or five years. “The nation’s most famous trail walker,” the Columbus Dispatch had called her in a story about the effort.

  The reporter asked how she kept in good enough shape to blaze trails.

  “Exercise is most important,” she said. “Too many people hop in the car to go two blocks for a bar of soap.”

  Where was she headed now? he asked.

  “I’ve always wanted to ride on a boat,” she said.

  A letter came to Lucy on February 24, 1960. Emma was aboard the Delta Queen, a Mississippi River steamboat, heading from Cincinnati to New Orleans for Mardi Gras with 130 passengers from fifteen states and Canada. The night before, docked in Memphis, the Delta Queen calliope premiered. Five thousand people and the mayor of Memphis stood on the banks to listen. “It has been a nice trip so far,” she wrote. “We have a masquerade party tonight.”

  Two months later, on April 28, she set out from Springer Mountain in Georgia, the new southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, to try to complete her third A.T. hike. She had to abandon the hike after seventy-five miles, at Deep Gap, North Carolina, because of a massive blowdown. “It would take 100 men three months to cut their way through that,” she told the local paper.

  On June 2, she was photographed hiking along the eighty-five-mile Horseshoe Trail near Hershey, Pennsylvania, where she had asked a group of boys if they had any food.

  Thirteen days later, on June 15, a reporter found her nin
ety-five miles away, in Wind Gap, Pennsylvania. She told him she was headed “vaguely north,” maybe to Canada.

  “You look strong,” the reporter told her.

  “What did you expect?” Emma replied.

  He asked if she kept her children in the loop with postcards.

  “I write to ’em,” she said, “but I don’t tell ’em nothing. I don’t see any use in making a big fuss about it. I just do what I want to do.”

  A week later, she was at her daughter Lucy’s door, in White Plains, New York, telling of the porcupine that tried to sleep on her feet and the rat she kicked away while she slept against a stone wall.

  Two weeks later, a resident of Cheshire, Massachusetts, phoned the local newspaper to report that the “tough as a nail” hiking grandmother had just left her home for the summit of nearby Mount Greylock, the highest point in the state, the peak coveted by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry David Thoreau.

  A few days later, the North Adams Transcript reported that “the great-grandmother of the hiking fraternity” paid for a fifteen-minute airplane ride so she could see the Appalachian Trail from above.

  Twenty-three days later, on August 7—one year to the day from when she finished the Oregon Trail—Emma crossed the border into Canada, the Long Trail of Vermont behind her. There were no cheering crowds. Just trees. She was happy nonetheless. She scratched out a letter and sent it to the folks back home.

  It was a hard trip, but in spite of all the obstacles I stuck it out to the end. Some of those mountains are quite a challenge for one my age, and I wondered a lot of times whether I could make it, but I kept putting one foot ahead of the other until I got to Canada. I did not sleep out as there are plenty of cabins and shelters. Only three times was there anyone in camp with me. There were two boys who started from the north but will not go far I imagine, as they were too lazy to get up and start in the morning. One has to work hard at it if they are to get far. I hiked alone the entire trip, but I took my time so that I did not hurt myself in any way. I saw a bear and a cub on Breadloaf Mountain. The cub went up a tree and the mother pranced around going “whup, whup.” I was about 30 feet from them and they were too near the trail for me to pass. I went back and sat on a rock for a few minutes and they went away. I roasted a porcupine that I killed. I first threw him in the fire and got all the quills off, then I skinned the thing. It looked all right and did not smell bad. It had such a nice liver so I put it on a stick and roasted it, salted it and cut off a bite, took one or two chews on it and spit it out. It took me two or three days to get that taste out of my mouth. I had the porky over the fire, and after the liver my imagination got the better of me and I dropped the thing in the fire and burned him up.