Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (13 page)

News of her walk had even reached a young writer at a fledgling magazine called
Sports Illustrated
in New York City. Reporter Mary Snow began to wonder whether the eccentric grandmother on the Appalachian Trail might make for a good profile. The newspaper stories had addressed the
Who, What, Where, When,
and
How,
but no reporter had touched on the most important, intriguing question:
Why?
Snow would. But first things first: how do you track down someone in the wilderness who is hiking at a clip of fourteen miles a day?

Meanwhile, Emma had her own problems, besides her swollen feet. She had left Port Clinton, Pennsylvania, after a good night’s rest, enjoyed a lovely walk the next afternoon, bunked in a cabin at Blue Mountain for a dollar, then headed for Palmerton, Pennsylvania, on the morning of July 19. She tried to rent a hotel room, but the folks there wouldn’t let her stay. She wondered what she must look like. She had found a faucet that morning and washed her face, but without a comb she had no way to brush the knots out of her iron-gray hair. She had sifted through a campfire and found a fork,
which she used as a comb. Now, though, she was leaving yet another hotel, exhausted and wondering where she should go for the night.

She was walking down the road’s shoulder when a car pulled up beside her in the dusk. Driving was a young woman from the hotel who appeared burdened by her conscience. She asked Emma to climb in, saying she wanted to take her into Palmerton proper. A few minutes later they pulled up at a hotel and Emma got a room for the night for two dollars. She soaked her feet in a bath and walked down the street to Sally’s Restaurant for a sandwich. Someone there told her she needed to meet Ralph Leh and the waitress, Sally, got him on the phone.

Leh, bespectacled and seventy, was retired from New Jersey Zinc Co., and he was quite the hiker himself. Besides climbing Mount Washington, he had spent the spring before helping clear the Appalachian Trail to Devil’s Pulpit on the Lehigh Gap. He knew that section of the trail like the back of his hand.

Leh invited Emma to stay at his house, so she fetched her bag from the hotel and showed up on his front porch. The two talked into the night, forming a bond that would last for years. Leh called up the newspaper in Allentown and two journalists came for yet another interview. The reporter asked her what surprised her most about the hike.

“All the publicity the newspapers give me,”
she said.

The next morning, Leh drove her across town to a store called Grant’s, which wasn’t yet open for the day. Once Leh explained who his company was, the clerk obliged and invited them in, pleased to accommodate. Emma scanned the aisle for a pair of women’s shoes that would fit, but the largest size was much too small. Her feet had swollen out of women’s shoes. She slipped into a comfortable pair of men’s shoes, size 8½, which gave her a little room should her feet continue to expand. She bought the shoes, two pairs of wool and nylon socks, and some wire hairpins. The
clerk, out of kindness, gave her three five-cent packages of Life Savers and wished her lots of luck.

Leh drove Emma back to Lehigh Gap, where she had left the trail, and the two climbed the cliff to the top. Leh thought Emma might need help getting up the steep embankment, but he was surprised to see her scale the wall, lugging her bag and maple walking stick, without help.

He bid her good-bye from below and, again, she was alone.

Emma wrote to her daughters again on February 20, 1938, from her sister Lucy’s house in Santa Ana, California, where she had found a job working as a practical nurse. She was burdened deeply by her decision to leave her family and peeved by the repeated attempts from her husband to lure her home. Nevertheless, she was considering returning, even then.

Dear Louise and Lucy:

It is dear of you to write to me and send the nice candy and valentines. I like the pictures you draw and am so glad you are getting along so nicely in school. I hope I can be with you sometime and do all the nice little things I would love to do…. I have a lovely place to stay and there is loads of lovely flowers of all kinds. I would tell you more only your dad would write to the man in the mountains with lots of flowers and such and such a house etc. etc. like he did when I was at Orange. I have Sunday off and spend it here with Mother. It is quite a little drive but it is nice to be with Mother. Don’t you think it would be nice to be with your mother? I picked some oranges and made some fruit salad for dinner or lunch as
the city folks say…. My side hurts pretty badly sometimes. Some nights I can hardly get to sleep for the pain. I want to have it seen to as soon as I can. It should make your Dad feel good to know he did it, throwing me down in the floor. My breast is still blue where he jumped on me, but the lump is gone. I go to bed now and everything is just as peaceful and quiet as can be. Hoping you are fine and be nice girls so I can be proud of you.

With loads of love,

Mama

The pain in her side was getting worse, and though she was working six days a week, she couldn’t easily afford to see a doctor. In the days after she mailed the letter, she devised a plan. She’d return home to be with her daughters and P.C. would have to pay for her medical care, whatever that might entail.

The decision would almost kill her.

The Delaware Water Gap, with its scenic overlooks and rhododendron tunnels and magnificent waterfalls, was just ahead, and she was walking hard to get there before dark. She was coming down out of an upthrust of rocks on Kittatinny Mountain, in a hurry to find a place to stay before night set in, when she slipped.

The fall wasn’t bad, but she felt a short, sharp pain in her knee. She examined the injury and tested the knee under her full weight. To her relief, the sprain wasn’t severe, but even a minor injury on the trail can be devastating, especially when it’s exacerbated by continuous pounding. Ahead were the toughest, tallest mountains, in New Hampshire and Vermont and Maine, and she’d need to be in
top condition. She walked on and found a pool of water and some picnic tables in the dark. Someone had told her there weren’t any houses in the vicinity, so she made her bed on one of the tables and tried to find sleep.

She didn’t know whether she had made her bed at the local make-out spot or what, but at several times during the night, headlights would swing across the bend as cars pulled into the park. And every time, upon catching sight of the worn-out human sprawled on the picnic table, the cars spun around and sped away, as if
something were chasing them, leaving behind an old woman, half asleep and chuckling.

She wasn’t on the trail but five minutes the morning of July 22 when she came to a village—so near to where she’d had a terrible time trying to sleep. Hotels, motels, restaurants, houses. The time was 5:45
AM
, so nothing was open, but she waited around a bit, hoping to grab a bite to eat before she set off again. A couple men noticed her on the sidewalk and told her the restaurants didn’t open until 8:00 A
M.
She couldn’t wait that long, so she set off across the bridge over the Delaware River and into New Jersey, the eighth state she’d walked through in eighty days. She hadn’t made it far into New Jersey when a Jeep pulled up beside her and the driver rolled down his window. He was wearing a police uniform.

What’s your name?
the man asked.

Emma wondered what she had done wrong. She thought, by the way he had said it, that she was in trouble. Maybe he mistook her for a vagrant.

Emma Gatewood,
she said.

You’re wanted on the telephone,
the man said. He opened the door on the passenger side, and she climbed in and they drove to his office not far away. A
Sports Illustrated
reporter named Mary Snow wanted Emma to call her collect in New York City. It took her an hour to get through and the officer poured Emma a glass of milk and gave her a doughnut while she dialed. When she finally reached Mary Snow, the two chatted for a while and Snow asked Emma to call her on Monday to let Snow know her location. She asked if she could tag along for a bit and write a profile of the hiking grandmother. Emma didn’t see a problem with that. She promised to call.

The next day was a bitter disappointment. The trail was difficult, high above the Delaware River Valley on Kittatinny Ridge, and she did not make it far on her sprained knee. She slept beside the path, three miles from Crater Lake. A deer came in the night, snorting, and she was glad it wasn’t a bear. She stayed the next night in the High Point Monument, an obelisk built to honor the war dead, and the next in a rest home, of all places, where she had plopped down on the grass out front and waited for the proprietor to invite her in.

On July 26, she made it to the Appalachian Lodge in Vernon, New Jersey, and found a bed in a shed on an army cot. If she kept the pace, by the next afternoon she’d be in New York, nearing the Hudson River Valley, where she was to meet Mary Snow.

JULY 27-AUGUST 2, 1955

Just south of the hardscrabble river city of Port Jervis, New York, she turned south and snaked along the state line, the low and fertile black-dirt region to her east, until the trail turned north near Greenwood Lake, New York, then back to the east, toward the Palisades Interstate Park, forty miles north of Manhattan and the millions of people rushing about in the city.

At Lake Mombasha, she met a man and two children who were going for a swim. The man said the lake was private property before starting up the trail. Emma followed them, talking about the trail and chattering about her walk until the man grew interested. She pulled from her bag a few of the newspaper clippings she had collected and was showing the man when a woman walked up and introduced herself as Mary Snow.

Emma wasn’t able to reach her on Monday or Tuesday when she called, so she was surprised to see Snow waiting. They chatted a while and made plans to meet a few hours later where the trail crossed Route 17, which carried white-knuckled tourists from the city to the Catskill Mountains and back. Snow then said good-bye. Emma started walking and came to a steep and dangerous rock scramble surging skyward called Agony Grind, known to make grown men say embarrassing things. Emma, on a bum leg, would later write in her diary that it was a “pretty hard and rocky piece of trail.”