Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (7 page)

She bought shoes and a raincoat and got a bite to eat in Gatlinburg, then tried to hitchhike back to the trail, but nobody would stop. She checked into a motel instead.

She caught the bus the next morning and got back on the trail by 8:00
AM
, hiking quickly to break in her new sneakers. A heavy fog settled over the Smoky Mountains that evening and a chill set in, so Emma heated smooth stones in the fire and slept atop them to keep her back warm.

She made it to the edge of the Smoky Mountain National Park, near the line separating North Carolina and Tennessee, the following day, and she fell in love with the fields of rhododendron and
laurel that seemed to be growing everywhere she looked. She lost the trail once and asked some boys to point her in the right direction. When she found the trail in the rain, it had been plowed up. The muck from the tilled field clung to her shoes and the walk through the field was staggering. On the other side, as she walked down an abandoned buggy road, she found herself in a tunnel through the tall rhododendron. It was dark and eerie and, as the rain fell into the tunnel, quite beautiful.

She made it into Hot Springs, North Carolina, on May 28, after an arduous uphill climb. The little town on the French Broad River whispered of the past. In 1914, during World War I, the owner of a resort called the Mountain Park Hotel had struck a deal with the War Department to house prisoners of war there. By train came 2,200 Germans, four times the population of the town. They were mostly passengers, officers, and crew members from the world’s largest ship, the
Vaterland,
which had taken cover in an American port when Great Britain had declared war on Germany.

They were no ordinary prisoners of war. The men wore suits and ties and the women were fantastic dressmakers. They set about building a village on the hotel lawn using driftwood and scrap lumber. They built a chapel from flattened Prince Albert Tobacco tins. The townspeople developed friendships with the enemy aliens, and each Sunday afternoon they sat together for a concert from the prisoner orchestra. After the war, the prisoners from what had been the largest internment camp in the United States were transported to Fort Oglethorpe, in Georgia, where Emma had started her journey. But many of them had found their nineteen months of captivity so enjoyable that they returned with their families and settled in Hot Springs.

Emma sensed that brotherly love. The folks in the area were awfully nice, and just about everybody she bumped into insisted on feeding her and giving her something to drink. One woman gave her a glass of buttermilk and a piece of cake, her first on the trail,
and she enjoyed it. She heard the locusts sawing for the first time all year. On May 29, she came upon a small store and intended to buy some food for the desolate walk ahead. All the store had was a can of black beans and a box of raw prunes. She bought them anyway, and chewed the dry, hard prunes all afternoon until they were gone.

The sun was hot as she made her way up Turkey Bald Mountain. The climb was slow and Emma was lost in her thoughts when she heard something strange. It sounded like some kind of bird at first, a low sort of hiss, and she kept walking, unafraid, until she felt something strike the leg of her dungarees. She glanced down and there beside the trail was a rattlesnake, coiled and ready to strike again. She slammed the tip of her walking stick toward the snake and jumped sideways. She darted by, her adrenaline surging, her ribs rising with each short, sharp breath. The snake stayed coiled and Emma was soon yards past it, thankful, reminded of the danger of a single misstep.

JUNE 1–8, 1955

She’d been gone nearly a month.

Emma’s children hadn’t heard from her, had no idea where she was or what she was doing, but not one of them was worried. Their mama was raw-boned and sturdy, and despite her absence, they knew she’d be all right, whatever her ambitions. It wasn’t rare for her to be gone for long stretches, so if they gave her disappearance a passing thought, it did not dwell in their memories.

She zigzagged between North Carolina and Tennessee, thirsty, sore, tired, over roads of cut stone and up mountainsides steep and tall, sleeping outdoors more often than in, giving herself to the wilderness, planting a crop of memories, exploring the world and her own mind, writing in her little notebook of the challenges and rewards, the wild dogs that came in the night, the cozy fire that
made a campsite more cheerful, the magic of campers who shared their sausage sandwiches across picnic tables.

“My feet are sore,” she would write.

“I did not find any water,” she would write.

“I kept a fire for company as well as protection,” she would write.

“When I could not locate the trail after an hour, I was so near out of food,” she would write.

Occasionally, when she’d slip off the path, the woman who wouldn’t let a passing tramp go hungry back home in Ohio now gladly accepted invitations to rest or eat from the members of the long, linear neighborhood that was slowly, hiker by hiker, getting acquainted with the new Appalachian Trail.

The trail itself was the product of a dreamer, a man named Benton MacKaye. He said he had been inspired during a six-week hiking trip after graduating from Harvard, when he stood on Vermont’s Stratton Mountain and imagined a ridge-top trail running through wilderness across the entire distance of the range.

In 1921, when the idea had fermented, some friends convinced him to describe his vision in an article for the
Journal of the American Institute of Architects.
MacKaye wrote that the purpose of the trail would be to “extend the primeval environment and to set bounds to the metropolitan environment,” providing a grand natural backbone accessible by those packed into cities along the Eastern Seaboard. After the article was published, MacKaye led a concerted effort to involve hiking clubs, lawyers, and others who might help bring his plan to fruition. Hundreds contributed, blazing and mapping sections, searching through property and tax records in county courthouses, angling to cobble together and preserve for the public the longest continuous walking path in the world.

Ten years later, nearly half the trail had been marked—but mostly in the Northeast, where many trails had long been established and hiking communities had a history. Myron Avery, a young lawyer and early visionary who took the reins, helped organize hiking clubs and plan undeveloped sections. Avery became chairman of the fledgling Appalachian Trail Conference in 1931, and by the group’s meeting in 1937 in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the trail was nearly finished. Avery knew even then, though, that the A.T. would “never be completed.” It would shift and bend and be subjected to endless rerouting and relocation, as if it had a life of its own. The timing of the completion was perfect, and it’s quite possible the trail might not have existed if the plan had been delayed.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States had just one hundred miles of paved highways. But by the 1930s, cities had begun to spill outward, like a spreading blot, and roads that had been designed for horses and buggies were quickly becoming obsolete. Maybe those early A.T. volunteers felt the need for expediency as their country transformed quickly, as the population grew, as the American automobile industry sped forward at an unprecedented rate.

The very same year of the trail conservancy meeting in Gatlinburg, in fact, the federal Public Works Administration signed a check for more than $29 million and the federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation bought nearly $41 million in revenue bonds, and 10,000 men began working day and night to move 26 million tons of earth and stone and pour 4.3 million square yards of reinforced concrete to create two steady, even, parallel lanes that ran the length of Pennsylvania—including more than 114 new bridges, with acceleration lanes and paved shoulders—bisecting the state east to west.
Popular Mechanics
would call the Penn Turnpike “America’s first highway on which full performance of today’s automobiles can be realized.”

The big road was born.

It’s ironic, perhaps, but the new expressway’s conceptual father was the same man who thought up the Appalachian Trail: Benton MacKaye. A few years after his article on the “primeval environment” that stretched from north to south, MacKaye, in an article in the
New Republic,
envisioned a “highway completely free of horses, carriages, pedestrians, town, grade crossings; a highway built for the motorist and kept free from every encroachment, except the filling stations and restaurants necessary for his convenience.”

Two years later, as the small army of trail blazers and pioneers worked to connect and maintain a footpath through a streak of American wilderness, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was already planning ways to absorb millions of soldiers, soon to engage fully in World War II, back into the nation’s economy once the last bullet had been fired. And he saw a national system of highways that connected the country’s major cities and spliced together rural agriculture centers as a possible solution. Planners immediately started charting a proposal to build or expand nearly forty thousand miles of road. By 1939, when Ford Motor Co.’s “The Road of Tomorrow” and General Motors’ “Highways and Horizons” exhibits opened at the New York World’s Fair, the American public was salivating over high-speed roadways.

“Since the beginning of civilization, transportation has been the key to man’s progress—his prosperity—his happiness,” said a narrator at the GM exhibit, which was said to feature the new and improved American city of 1960, with tangles of expressways lined with sleek cars and trucks. “With the fast, safely designed highways of 1960 … thrilling scenic feasts of great and beautiful country may now be explored.”

When Dwight D. Eisenhower took office in 1953, one of his first items of business was to see about building better highways. “Our cities still conform too rigidly to the patterns, customs, and
practices of fifty years ago,” he wrote. “Each year we add hundreds of thousands of new automobiles to our vehicular population, but our road systems do not keep pace with the need.”

Eisenhower thought the American road system was decent but had been designed based on “terrain, existing Indian trails, cattle trails, and arbitrary section lines,” and that it “has never been completely overhauled or planned to satisfy the needs of ten years ahead.” On Eisenhower’s behalf, at a meeting in the Adirondacks of the governors of the forty-eight states, Vice President Richard Nixon despaired over the nearly 40,000 people killed and 1.3 million injured on roads annually, the “billions of hours lost” to traffic jams and detours, and the traffic-related civil suits clogging courts. Then he shocked the room. He called for a $50 billion federal highway program spread over ten years.

On October 23 of the same year, in Emma Gatewood’s home state of Ohio, the first concrete was poured for a new $336 million cross-state turnpike. The state had acquired fifty-six hundred parcels of land it needed for right-of-way and went to work building a highway divided by a fifty-six-foot depressed median. It would feature paved shoulders, fifteen well-lit traffic interchanges, sixteen service plazas, tollbooths, and an ambulance service. “You really will be able to see where you’re going as the minimum sight distance is 900 feet,” gushed the
Columbus Dispatch.
“There are no steep hills, because the maximum upgrade is 2 percent and the maximum downgrade 3.2 percent. You won’t have to slow down from maximum speed limits—65 miles an hour for cars and 55 for trucks—when you drive around curves, they’re that gentle.”

Two years later, the ribbons of road stretched from Pennsylvania in the east to Indiana in the west, over rivers and streams, across swampland and rolling hills. Joined with the Penn Turnpike, the road totaled 611 miles from Philadelphia to Indianapolis. So
exciting was the new highway that the people of Ohio began to gather on overpasses to watch the speeding cars wend their way along the smooth pavement.

The future of America had arrived, and it was riding on a 322-cubic-inch V-8 with an automatic transmission. By 1955, Americans owned sixty-two million vehicles. By June, when Emma Gatewood was a month into her hike, the auto industry was on pace for a banner year behind presidents such as Tex Colbert and Henry Ford II. Chevrolet had set a six-month record, registering 756,317 new cars. The national magazines were filled with color pictures of the new ’56 models, the Studebaker, the Chrysler, the Cadillac, the Buick Dynaflow, with the sweep-ahead styling and the sizzle to match, which “gets going from a standing start like a lark leaving the nest, with not a hint of hesitation between take-hold and take-off.” Every car off the line in Detroit was bigger than the last. Fins grew, and engines added horses. The number of two-car families was expected to jump by three million within five years, to a total of 7.5 million, which was attributed to the trend of suburban living. Some sixteen million “one-car wives” remained marooned in the suburbs, but that would soon change. Advertisements for Old Crow bourbon and the Stetson Playboy were surrounded by those for Quaker State Motor Oil and B. F. Goodrich tires.