Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (9 page)

It was 10:00
PM
on the forty-eighth day of her journey when she finally gave in.

Leech fetched his camera. Emma sat up straight, tucked her right hand into her left, and smiled through false teeth.

That night, she jotted in her diary. “I finally was found by the newspaper,” she wrote.

The next morning, a headline ran in the
Roanoke Times.

O
HIO
W
OMAN,
67, H
IKING
2,050 M
ILES ON
A
PPY
T
RAIL

The prospect of a 2,050-mile hike over mountain trails would cause many a hardy soul to cringe. A 67-year-old great-grandmother from Gallipolis, Ohio, enjoys it.

Mrs. Emma Gatewood, who was in Botetourt County yesterday, is hiking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine.

She did 20 miles from Cloverdale to Bear Wallow Gap yesterday—in tennis shoes.

Frank Callahan and Preston Leech of the local Appalachian Trail Club met the energetic lady at Black Horse Gap yesterday afternoon after Blue Ridge Parkway rangers had reported her whereabouts.

The widowed mother of 11 children, Mrs. Gatewood spent the winter in California where she decided to travel the 2,050-mile trail, which follows mountain ranges up the eastern seaboard. She flew to Atlanta, Ga., and set foot on the trail at Mt. Oglethorpe, Ga., May 3. End of the trek will be the northern terminus at Mt. Katahdin, Me.

Modestly reluctant to discuss her plans, Mrs. Gatewood travels light, said Callahan and Leech. All her belongings are carried in a sack. She refuses all transportation offers along the trail but she will accept rides to nearby towns if she is taken back to the trail where she left it.

The Ohio housewife has 26 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Today she plans to move from the Peaks of Otter area north to the James River.

“Uphill walking is easier than going down,” she declared.

The news was out. She didn’t know it then, but the story—her story—would soon sweep the nation. She’d be mentioned in newspaper columns from Los Angeles to New York. Television shows would clamor for her time. As word spread like wood smoke, most towns she walked through, and even those she didn’t, would send a reporter to intercept her and ask her questions about how she’d done it, how she was feeling, why she had begun. They’d call her Grandma Gatewood, and her name would be heard on the street corners and in the halls of the United States Congress.

That morning, though, it was one measly article in one local newspaper. Still, she figured it was time to finally let her family
know what she was doing. She picked up a few postcards from the nearest store and dropped them in the mail. When she first left, she had told her children she was going on a walk. Now they’d know what she meant.

The trail was designed to have no end, a wild place on which to be comfortably lost for as long as one desired. In those early days, nobody fathomed walking the thing from beginning to end in one go. Section hikes, yes. Day hikes, too. But losing yourself for five months, measuring your body against the earth, fingering the edge of mental and physical endurance, wasn’t the point. The trail was to be considered in sections, like a cow is divided into cuts of beef. Even if you sample every slice, to eat the entire beast in a single sitting was not the point. Before 1948, it wasn’t even considered possible.

How long would it take? What equipment would one need? What maps? Where and when should one start? These were the unknowns, but the human spirit has a way of answering questions. The first came in the form of a man trying to shake his demons.

Earl Shaffer came home from World War II “confused and depressed,” he wrote. He had lost a close friend in the war, someone with whom he had shared a desire to hike the A.T. Like Emma Gatewood, he began considering the hike again after an article in a magazine,
Outdoor Life,
sparked his interest. The strong hiker found a plethora of obstacles: overgrowth, downed trees blocking the path, rough stretches where the trail wasn’t marked. Eleven years after its completion, whole sections of the trail seemed abandoned, forgotten.

He sent a postcard to a meeting of the Appalachian Trail Conference from Holmes, New York.

The flowers bloom, the songbirds sing

And though it sun or rain

I walk the mountain tops with Spring

From Georgia north to Maine.

The postcard was the first the A.T.C. volunteers had ever heard from Shaffer, and when he finished at Mount Katahdin, some doubted the claim until he showed slides, his journal, and talked about the trail in detail. The
Appalachian Trailway News
ran a small blurb headlined “Continuous Trip over Trail” on the back page, but his hike brought much attention. He was interviewed by the newspaper and got the attention of
National Geographic,
which sent a reporter to hike the trail. The path was in close proximity to half a dozen of the country’s biggest cities and nearly half the population of the United States, but before Shaffer, few even knew it existed. The attention helped.

It took three years for someone to repeat Shaffer’s achievement. A bearded, twenty-four-year-old Eagle Scout named Gene Espy came through in 1951, but he didn’t know he was only the second person to thru-hike until he was shown a newspaper clipping that confirmed it. He assumed many had done it before. Chester Dziengielewski and Martin Papendick became the first to hike the north-to-south route, from Maine to Georgia. In 1952, George Miller became the fifth thru-hiker, at age seventy-two. The first woman to hike the full trail in sections was Mary Kilpatrick, who finished the last part in 1939.

Then there was an enigma. In 1952, hikers along the A.T. reported meeting a couple called Dick Lamb and Mildred. Many assumed the two were married and took to referring to Mildred as Mildred Lamb. In fact, she was Mildred Lisette Norman, an American pacifist, vegetarian, and peace activist who had set out with a friend, Dick, to take the long journey. She eschewed folding money
and carried very few supplies, and would later become known as Peace Pilgrim, speaking at churches and universities through the American conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. She and Dick hiked north to the Susquehanna River, then took a bus to Maine and hiked from Mount Katahdin south.

No hiker received all that much attention, though, because independent reports on their progress were either nonexistent or sporadic. Many of them would later write books and communicate regularly with others who planned to thru-hike. But there wasn’t exactly an organized system for accountability in those days. The ATC, which was the only outfit interested in paying close attention to trail accomplishments, tended to take people at their word. And that required relying on hikers to both report their trips, and report them accurately.

Besides that, Americans weren’t all that interested. Or maybe they were distracted. World War II was over. The Korean War came to a close in 1953. But as soon as soldiers returned, the United States found itself locked in the Cold War, racing Soviet Russia toward the H-bomb. The news of H-bomb developments deeply impacted Americans, who found themselves discussing nuclear fallout and megatons and the genetic consequences of radioactivity at the dinner table.

On March 1, 1954, the United States launched its latest H-bomb on the atoll of Bikini, in the Pacific. The navy had marked off thirty thousand square miles as a danger zone that no ship was allowed to enter.

One made it through, however. A crew of Japanese fishermen aboard a boat called the
Lucky Dragon
were pulling in their nets when the bomb exploded. One of the men gave a captivating, awful account.

“We saw strange sparkles and flashes of fire as bright as the sun itself,” the fisherman told the press. “The sky glowed fiery red and
yellow. The glow went on for several minutes … and then the yellow seemed to fade away. It left a dull red, like a piece of iron cooling in the air. The blast came five minutes later, the sound of many thunders rolled into one. Next we saw a pyramid-shaped cloud rising and the sky began to cloud over most curiously.”

A few hours later a fine ash began to fall on the crew of the
Lucky Dragon,
eighty miles from the test site, who continued pulling in nets until the hold was full. They returned to Japan two weeks later complaining of burns, nausea, and bleeding from the gums. By then the radioactive catch, some 16,500 pounds of tuna, had been sold to markets across the country, causing mass panic and raising hostile anti-American sentiment among the Japanese. In September, the crew’s radio operator died, becoming the first Japanese victim of a hydrogen bomb.

The unprecedented destructiveness of the brand-new H-bomb was finally on full display, and it horrified the world. If a hydrogen bomb could do that to fishermen eighty miles away, what could it do to Manhattan? Or London? Or Tokyo?

Headlines in England cried:
CALL OFF
THAT
BOMB
. Winston Churchill foresaw a “peace of mutual terror.” Nikita S. Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, said, “We outstripped the capitalist class and created the hydrogen bomb before them. They think they can intimidate us. But nothing can frighten us, because if they know what a bomb means, so do we.”

At every turn, the United States, with its new destructive technology, was on the cusp of conflict with worldwide implications.

By 1955, the government was ramping up efforts to encourage Americans to prepare for fire from the sky. The Atomic Energy Commission built a million-dollar village, called “Survival City, U.S.A.,” in the Nevada desert, and stocked it with the furniture and appliances and mannequins to represent a typical American home. Then, on national television, the village was bombed. The furniture
was splintered and the dummies were burned, but the dogs and mice inside deep, concrete bomb shelters were spared, prompting an official with the Federal Civil Defense Administration to say the only shot at American survival was to “dig in or get out.”

It wasn’t just the Communist bombs Americans were afraid of. It was Communists themselves. The world had been divided after World War II, with Russia on one side and the United States on the other. And by 1955, the fear of Communism in America was intense. The newspapers were filled with stories of spy rings that stole state secrets and agents who had infiltrated government bureaus. The president had ordered chiefs of government bureaus to fire employees whose loyalty was in reasonable doubt and congressional committees were set up to determine the extent of Communist influence in the military and private industry. Libraries banned Communist literature. Colleges demanded loyalty oaths from professors. Some 20 million Americans, more than a tenth of the 166 million US citizens, were subjected to federal security investigations.

On Communism’s trail was Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, who had charged in 1950 that the US State Department was a nest of Communists and subversives. By 1954, the strong-necked, emotional politician was the most controversial figure in Washington and a new word had made its debut: McCarthyism. To some he was a fearless patriot, to others a dangerous charlatan. To all observers, he was on the edge of astonishing political power—until he was censured by the US Senate.

With the country buzzing about Communism, the Supreme Court had set the course for another period of disruption and civil unrest when, in May 1954, it ruled that “Separate education facilities are inherently unequal,” ending racial segregation in public schools. The ruling touched off praise and anguish.

“Little by little we move toward a more perfect democracy,” read an editorial in the
New York Times.

“The Court has blatantly ignored all law and precedent,” said Georgia governor Herman Talmadge. “Georgia will not comply.”

The ruling had the largest impact on the states along the Appalachian Trail, especially in the South. School segregation was required in seventeen states at the time of the ruling, and six of those (Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia) were home to the A.T. Four others (Alabama, Delaware, Kentucky, and South Carolina) were close to the trail. In White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, not far from the trail, three hundred white students held a strike when about twenty-five black students tried to attend school in September 1954. That evening, hundreds of white adults met and voted to remove from class any black students who came to school the next day. None did, but the revolt began to spread, to Milford, Delaware; and Baltimore, Maryland; and Washington, DC.

The other shocking story of the period was the rapid rise in juvenile crime. Headlines in New York screamed about the “Teen-Age Thrill Killers,” a band of four boys from respectable Brooklyn homes who killed a man, beat another up and dumped him in the East River, horsewhipped two girls, and set another man on fire.

Across the country, killer kids made news. A twelve-year-old basketball player from Detroit killed another after a game. A seventeen-year-old from Toledo raped and killed a girl. A fourteen-year-old babysitter in Des Moines killed an eight-year-old because he wouldn’t stay in bed. The national crime rate for boys and girls under eighteen had jumped 8 percent between 1953 and 1954.