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

by Montgomery, Ben

  “It was just as clear, and it looked like I could almost reach out and get the stars, and pull them down,” she said. “Oh, I lay there and watched them. It looked so, it was so nice, and it was…. Oh, I enjoyed that night. The little old growth on there was just about so high and just as thick as it could be. There’s a lot of little pines around there, and I got down, I got down to sort of break the wind, you know? I’ll tell you, that was a nice night. I lay there and looked at those stars, and that moon.”

  On the last leg of the bus trip, in Florida, she felt air conditioning for the first time, and it was cold and unnatural upon her skin. She felt slightly ill when she got home in late May and blamed it on the artificial cool of the bus. It did not slow her. She prepared the earth for a garden, hoeing and tilling. She planted half runners, potatoes, nasturtiums, corn, and beans. She wrote some letters to distant family. She went to Sunday school and church and played a game of Scrabble with a friend. She cleaned around the flowerbed and swept the walk. She worked in her garden again on Saturday and called her son Nelson on Sunday to say she wasn’t feeling well, that something was wrong—this from a woman who had been sick just once in her life. Nelson dispatched an ambulance and raced to the hospital, flanked by a sympathetic highway patrolman, and found his mother in a coma.

  The next morning, June 4, 1973, Nelson’s wife and sister were sitting beside Emma’s bed when she opened her eyes, closed them again, then hummed a few bars of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord …

  The obituaries said she “gained national and world fame” for her hikes. One quoted her daughter Rowena, who told of how Emma had learned of the trail from a magazine article. “She said, ‘If those men can do it, I can do it.’”

  The Ohio Senate passed a resolution in her memory, noting her accomplishments, that she was a founder of the Buckeye Trail, and that she had “inspired many, particularly young people, toward an interest in and an appreciation for the outdoors and in the relationship between man and his natural environment.”

  They lowered Emma Rowena Gatewood into the ground on a pretty hillside in the Ohio Valley Memorial Gardens in Gallia County. Her marker says simply:

  EMMA R. GATEWOOD

  GRANDMA

  JUNE 7, 2012

  Lucy Gatewood Seeds sits alone inside the lodge of a mountain resort in Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania, waiting for her family to dress for dinner. She stares out the large glass windows at the tall trees surrounding the lodge, listening for birds. She’s not as good at identifying their songs as she once was, but if she listens long enough, the names come back.

  She wears her eighty-four years well. Her gray hair is cut short and her bangs curl toward her forehead. The top button is buttoned on her flowered blouse.

  Most of her family is here. Two sons and a daughter, and three grandchildren. Her sister, Louise, will arrive soon.

  Lucy spots a man walking down the pavement toward the lodge. He is bearded and wearing a large backpack, covered by a rain tarp. The man is soaking wet when he steps inside. He doesn’t remove his pack, but stands near the door and shakes water from his hands.

  Lucy waves and the man smiles back.

  “Did you come from the trail?” she asks.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the man says. “Just now.”

  “I’m Lucy Gatewood Seeds,” Lucy says as the man approaches. “Grandma Gatewood was my mother.”

  “You’re kidding!” the man says, reaching out his hand. “I read about your mama and I just couldn’t believe it. It just really moved me.”

  Lucy smiles.

  “She did it three times, right?” the man asks.

  “Two thru-hikes and once in sections,” Lucy replies. “And she went from Mount Oglethorpe, not Springer Mountain, where the trail starts today. So it was a little longer.”

  “She’s one of the big reasons I’m here,” he says. “I’m Stats.”

  “Hi, Stats,” she says. “I’m Lucy.”

  She hugs the wet man like it doesn’t matter.

  “Grandma Gatewood,” he says. “That’s a name I haven’t forgotten.”

  Stats’s real name is Chris Odom and he’s a physicist and former rocket scientist who now teaches physics at a Quaker boarding school. This is his eighty-seventh day on the trail and he decided to stay in the lodge, near the halfway point, because he’s meeting his family soon. He first heard of the trail twenty-two years ago, in college, when he saw a map on the wall of his girlfriend’s father’s home. He asked about it, and the father sent him home with a two-volume set of books about the A.T. One of the stories was about Grandma Gatewood.

  “Mrs. Emma Gatewood, better known along the trail as Grandma Gatewood, is probably the best-known of all the hikers who have completed the 2,000 miles of the Appalachian Trail,” the story read. “Almost every through hiker has his favorite story about Grandma, which he has heard along the trail. She is the kind of personality about whom legends grow.”

  He wants a photo with Lucy. They stand near the fireplace.

  “Now, what did you think?” he asks Lucy. “You were a grown woman when she set out. Were you worried?”

  “No, no, no,” Lucy says. “My mother was amazing.”

  “She started the spark for me twenty-two years ago,” Stats says. “Your mom’s story just captivated me.”

  This is the amazing reality of Grandma Gatewood’s legacy. Somehow her story became a motivating tale for those who came in contact with it, man or woman, regardless of generation. Her hikes brought attention to the trail like none before. That’s true as well for Ken “Buckeye” Bordwell, wearing a long white beard and hiking boots, who introduces himself to Lucy. He first heard of the A.T. when his father read stories about Emma aloud at their home in Cincinnati. His father followed her progress in the newspapers, tuned in to the old woman walking. In junior high school, Ken started to fantasize about setting out himself.

  “That was one of the things that put it in my mind and made me a sitting duck for the ‘Appalachian Trail Disease,’” he said. “There are certain ones among us who hear about the A.T., and then it’s all over.”

  He started chipping off sections of the trail in 1965 and completed his final section last summer. “She helped many people become aware of the trail,” Bordwell says. “She may have been one of the greatest publicists the trail ever had. A single, elderly woman, walking the whole thing? You can’t buy publicity like that.”

  Gene Espy, the second thru-hiker, is here, too. The old Boy Scout hadn’t heard about Grandma Gatewood’s hikes until the 1970s, but they impressed him. He had trail guides, to say nothing of his pup tent and solid backpacking gear. “I thought that was a pretty good trick that she was able to carry her pack on her shoulder like that,” he said. “You need your hands for climbing and whatnot. I thought it was a pretty good trick.”

  The reach of her story is hard to measure in any scientific way. But in the twenty years since the Internet brought us connectivity, many hikers have taken to journaling online about their outdoor experiences, and a search of one of the popular hosting sites— TrailJournals.com—turns up more “Grandma Gatewood” entries than you’d ever care to read. Some are calls to press forward— “Remember Grandma Gatewood!” and that kind of thing. Others speak to a deeper influence.

  “Back when I was just a kid, my family belonged to and was active in a group called the National Campers & Hikers Association. I met ‘Grandma’ Gatewood, when she was the guest of honor at the first NCHA convention that I attended with my parents and sister at Lake of the Ozarks State Park in Missouri,” wrote a hiker called Granny Franny. “She led us kids on hikes around trails in the state park, and I really enjoyed this feisty old lady who hiked. ‘When I grow up, I’m going to do that,’ I told myself.”

  “Over the years the story of Grandma Gatewood has remained in my mind and served as inspiration when I thought about all the reasons why I might not be able to do this hike,” wrote a
woman called Rockie.

  “On the way up to the top of Mt. Guyot, I encountered the spirit of Grandma Gatewood,” wrote Gatorgump. “She approached me as I was gasping for breath and feeling faint. I recognized her immediately from old photographs.”

  Among those who study the trail, those who know its history inside and out, her legacy is indelible. “She drew a lot of attention to the Appalachian Trail,” said Larry Luxenberg, author of Walking the Appalachian Trail. “Her hikes inspired a lot of people. No matter how bad your hike is, how difficult the trail is, you could always point to Grandma Gatewood and say, ‘Well, she did it.’”

  Beyond the attention, and beyond her well-documented criticism that prompted better maintenance and upkeep, her hikes crumbled the psychological barrier that existed between the American public and this long path through the wilderness. She introduced people to the A.T., and at the same time she made the thru-hike achievable. It didn’t take fancy equipment, guidebooks, training, or youthfulness. It took putting one foot in front of the other—five million times.

  “She boasted that she was the only one of the thru-hikers of the Trail that really roughed it, and she was probably right,” Ed Garvey said before he died. “She lacked most of the pieces of equipment that hikers consider absolutely essential, but she possessed that one ingredient, desire, in such full measure that she never really needed the other things.”

  Many A.T. scholars, Luxenberg included, point to Garvey as the man who turned on America to the thru-hike. It’s true that his book, Appalachian Hiker, which offered practical advice, was popular; when he died in 1999, it was in its third edition. The book— and Garvey’s hike—also received a fair amount of attention from the popular press. Part of the reason so many point to Garvey’s thru-hike in 1970 and his subsequent book as an A.T. turning-point is because the number of thru-hikers began to rise significantly around the same time. From 1936 to 1969, only fifty-nine completions were recorded. From 1970 to 1979, 760 completions were recorded—a huge spike. That doubled in the 1980s, then doubled again in the 1990s. Nearly six thousand people hiked the entire length of the A.T. between 2000 and 2009. And it all seemed to start with Garvey’s book.

  But let’s split hairs for a moment. In 1964, the year Emma Gatewood completed the entirety of the trail for the third time, four others finished as well. The following three years saw just eight completions. Then, in 1968, six hikers finished. In 1969, ten finished. Ten more completed the trail in 1970, the year of Garvey’s hike. The surprise comes in 1971, when that number doubles—twenty-one people completed two-thousand-mile hikes that year, the most ever and more than double the number of two-thousand-milers from the year before. Here’s the thing: it wasn’t until December 1, 1971, after those twenty-one hikes were finished, that Appalachian Hiker was released. So, with all due respect to the late Mr. Garvey, the spike started before his book.

  “She opened the door of knowledge of the trail to the general public,” said Robert Croyle, membership secretary for the Appalachian Trail Museum and an accomplished outdoorsman. “Her hike brought attention to the trail that was sorely needed. Interest in the trail that she created caused interest in maintaining the trail, and that’s carried on through today.”

  “She has become a folk icon and a symbol of the A.T. being for any American,” said Laurie Potteiger, information services manager for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. “She is in a class by herself. Earl Shaffer has his own legacy, but in terms of a folk hero, she has a special place in A.T. history. Her story is immediately fascinating.”

  Lucy Gatewood Seeds is here in Boiling Springs with her family because Grandma Gatewood is being inducted into the Appalachian Trail Hall of Fame, and, in a way, Lucy is the keeper of the flame. She’s the youngest of Emma’s four surviving children, who have all lived good, long lives. Lucy has kept her mother’s correspondence, journals, and photographs. She makes copies of newspaper clippings and journal entries and puts together scrapbooks to share with those who are interested. She has lent to museums her inherited memorabilia—old shoes, Band-Aid tins, and denim sacks. And she protects her mother’s legacy. When Lucy learned that the author Bill Bryson had mentioned her mother in his best-selling book about the A.T., she found the passage, then found it unflattering.

  “Probably the most famous, certainly the most written about, of all thru-hikers was Emma ‘Grandma’ Gatewood,” Bryson wrote, “who successfully hiked the trail twice in her late sixties despite being eccentric, poorly equipped, and a danger to herself. (She was forever getting lost.)”

  Lucy fired off a letter to the witty writer, who hiked only 39.5 percent of the A.T. himself.

  “Eccentric, perhaps, but kindly, please. Lost, never, just misdirected,” she wrote. “I hope you have the satisfaction of completing the trail some day.”

  These are Lucy’s moments. She was disheartened to learn that her mother wasn’t in the inaugural Hall of Fame class, which included Myron Avery, Gene Espy, Ed Garvey, Benton MacKaye, Arthur Perkins, and Earl Shaffer. She let it be known. When the second class was announced, she was pleased.

  “When I’m dead and gone,” Emma told Lucy and Louise once, in a tone that was certain and not at all arrogant, “they’re going to erect monuments to me.”

  She was right. In the Hall of Fame down the road, her wooden bust is on a mantle and a display case tells her story. She came to pioneer three separate groups of A.T. hikers: seniors, women, and “ultra-light,” a style of minimalist hiking, carrying as little gear as possible, which has recently come into vogue. She was even the inspiration for a lightweight rain cape that doubles as a shelter—the Gatewood Cape.

  She also remains in elite company. Nearly four decades after her third A.T. jaunt, just eight women and fifty-five men have completed three two-thousand-mile hikes, according to Appalachian Trail Conservancy records.

  “She was so proud of all she had done, and she had gotten so much public attention from it,” said Louise. “She figured that it was going to be noteworthy and people were going to remember her.”

  When it’s time for the ceremony, Lucy is ready. She has delivered versions of the same speech before, but this night is special. The hall at the Allenberry Resort Inn is packed with hikers, politicians, and philanthropists, those with interest in preserving the A.T. for the next generation. They speak of the trail’s importance and its tentative future, how development threatens and protecting the wilderness is in everyone’s interest. When they began speaking of the pioneers, Larry Luxenberg talks about Emma.

  “Most women would have been content to live out their lives in comfort,” he says.

  “Many call her the first thru-hiker celebrity,” he says.

  “She was a hiker for the ages,” he says.

  Lucy is called to the podium. The crowd sits silently.

  “People call her Grandma Gatewood,” Lucy says, “but I call her mamma.”

  They still ask.

  Wherever Lucy goes, whenever Grandma Gatewood comes up in conversation, people want to know why she did what she did. No surprise there. The question in general has prompted at least one scholarly study, in 2007, called Why Individuals Hike the Appalachian Trail: A Qualitative Approach to Benefits. The researchers found that common reasons were the standard fare: being outdoors, hiking, the fun and enjoyment of life, warm relationships, physical challenge, camaraderie, solitude, and survival.

  It’s easy enough, I guess, to take Emma’s various responses at face value. Maybe she never thought too long or hard about why she wanted to test herself against nature. Maybe the first time was a lark, as she said, or some primal need to see what was over the next hill, then the next. That might explain the first trip, but then she learned how difficult it was, how painful, how the rosy National Geographic article had been wrong.

  And she did it again. And again. That’s where my understanding begins to fall short. We could, of course, leave it at her being eccentric, as Bill Bryson wrote, but that’s far too easy an explanati
on. She did, after all, keep good company on the trail, making friends who were very glad to see her on her return, and not in some sideshow kind of way. She was well read, well spoken, and white-gloves proper. It’s true that she could twitch her gentility slightly to let you know you had done or said something of which she didn’t approve. But to suggest she was eccentric is to suggest it would be strange for her to walk. We know that she couldn’t drive, and that it wasn’t out of the ordinary for her to walk five or ten miles to visit a friend in the course of her daily life. The long hikes were simply an extension of that, a means of getting from point A to point B. Eccentric? No.

  Lucy believes that her mother wanted to be the first woman to thru-hike the trail, and that’s worth thinking about. A minor problem with that theory arises when you consider that the story that introduced her to the trail was written in 1949, five years before she set out the first time, in ’54. There’s no indication that Emma saw or read anything about the trail in that span, so how would she have known whether another woman had completed the hike? Maybe Lucy is right in a general sense—but if being the first of her gender was the primary motivating factor, wouldn’t she have made certain that no other woman had gone before her?

  I believe Emma Gatewood was honest. I also believe there’s an equal chance that her stock answers were covers. They were honest—and also incomplete—responses to a question she couldn’t bring herself to fully answer, not when she was a “widow.” Not when she had a secret. Not when she had tasted her own blood, felt her ribs crack, and seen the inside of a jail cell. To suggest she was trying to be the first woman means believing that she was walking toward something. I’m not sure that’s wholly true. I’m not sure she was walking toward something so much as walking away.