Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (18 page)

Emma thought about staying. She would have liked to, but she needed to make progress after a slow and miserable last couple of days. She said good-bye to the group from Harlem, picked up her pace, and put in seven more miles through farmland and a long patch of lowlands before bedding down for the night at Buffum Shelter. She logged the experience in her diary, adding: “The boys, all but one colored, were very nice.”

There is no other mention of them in her journals, and one might easily assume from the paragraphs dedicated to the chance encounter that the boys were simply Roman Catholic youths on a wilderness journey. Their story was lost for decades. But before his death in 2010, one of the white leaders would recount meeting Emma Gatewood on the trail. Rev. Dr. David Loomis wrote this version of those few wet days:

The summer I turned 21, I worked for a church in East Harlem, New York, which had the highest density of population on earth at that time and a murder rate to prove it. Each square inch of concrete was fought over by gangs, with summer’s heat adding fuel to that fire.

In hopes of brokering peace between the two largest rival gangs, the church I worked for had me take the four top
honchos of each gang for a week-long hike along the Appalachian Trail in Vermont. None of the eight could resist the church’s invitation to take an all-expenses-paid vacation far from the heat of the city.

Our first day out, we hiked 15 miles out before a hurricane unexpectedly blew inland and trapped us inside an 8 x 20 foot trailside lean-to. As night fell, Emma Gatewood, a 5’2” grandma who was living her dream of hiking the entire trail from Georgia to Maine staggered into camp. Bruised, exhausted, her gear and provisions washed away by swollen streams, she was in dire need. What made things tricky was that Emma was a genteel white Southern lady. She could hide neither her drawl nor her unease at living in close proximity to eight young black males, her distress leading all eight to bestow on her their stoniest stares.

It rained and blew hard…. The brute force of nature so overwhelmed us it literally dissolved the tension in our lean-to. That hurricane, by facing us with a severe, totally mutual challenge, forced us all back to what we had in common, our humanity. Like people trapped in a lifeboat, we came together to try to stay afloat. We took turns standing by a fire we had built by breaking off dead branches, thereby freeing up enough floor space for five of us to stretch out and sleep. We also took turns getting drenched collecting more deadwood.

Hiking out once the rains let up, Emma piggybacked on a variety of youthful backs as we forded swollen torrents that would have swept her downstream had she attempted them on her own. Whoever she was piggybacking on had somehow to stay balanced mid-stream while enduring a
tight, often suffocating neck squeeze from her two thin, bony arms.

Mary Snow’s story about Emma ran in
Sports Illustrated
on August 15—the day Emma would face death—under a black-and-white photograph of her on the trail. The headline was: P
AT
ON
THE
B
ACK
.

A 67-year-old great-grandmother, Mrs. Emma Gatewood of Gallipolis, Ohio, is determined to be the first woman to hike the entire length of the Appalachian Trail, 2,050 miles of mountain footpath from Mt. Oglethorpe, Georgia, to Mt. Katahdin, Maine. Mrs. Gatewood, alone and without a map, began following the white blaze marks of the trail early in May, and this week from Connecticut’s Cathedral Pines, Grandmother Gatewood could look back on 1,500 miles of the best and worst of nature. She had carefully avoided disturbing three copperheads and two rattlesnakes on the trail, flipped aside one attacking rattler with a walking stick. When caught without nearby shelter she had heated some stones and slept on them to keep from freezing. For snacks Grandma nibbled wild huckleberries, young sorrel for salad and sucked bouillon cubes to combat loss of body salt.

Her contacts with other humans ranged from a miserly individual who refused her even a drink, to a generous housewife who supplied fried chicken to carry on the trail.

Mrs. Gatewood is serenely confident that she can finish her trek. “I’ll get there except if I break something loose. And when I get atop Mt. Katahdin, I’ll sing
America, The Beautiful,
‘From sea to shining sea.’”

She could go no farther.

She had started at 6:00
AM
and faced a wicked, weedy trail all morning before coming to Clarendon Gorge. This one was wider than the others, forty feet from bank to bank, wide enough to necessitate a bridge even when the creek wasn’t flooded. The old bridge had burned some time ago and a temporary bridge had been fashioned, but rains from the storm had washed the new bridge out. There was no way she could cross.

She walked up the gorge a ways and found a spot that she estimated was only about three feet deep, but the water was moving so swiftly that she wasn’t about to try it alone. She hollered into the woods to see if anybody was within earshot. Maybe there was a chance someone nearby knew where she could get across. She got no response. She was all alone, and she was stuck.

She removed the damp clothes from her sack and laid them out in the sun to dry. If she was going to be forced to wait, at least she could be productive and lighten her load a bit. She spread out her blanket, too, and decided to catch a little sun. After days of gray, cloud-covered skies, the warm light was welcome.

And she waited. Nobody came by noon, or by one o’clock, or by two, or by three. Long hours she spent idle. Then, around four o’clock, she heard someone coming. She stood and peered down the trail and saw who it was: Howard Bell and Steve Sargent, the two boys she had met several days before. The navy boys. She couldn’t have planned it better. She was surprised, and very happy to see those two.

They’d had a rough go. What started as a nice little outdoor break from the navy had turned into a wet and soppy journey. It had rained eight out of the nine days they’d been on the trail, so much that their feet were blistered and they were miserable.

Emma told them about her predicament and walked them down to the gorge that was now so wide and flowing so fast. The young men inspected the water and decided they could wade across if they took some precautions. They walked back to where they had dropped their backpacks. One of the boys fished a big bunch of parachute cord from his. He tied Emma’s sack securely to the top of his big, heavy backpack, then tied a length of cord around his waist. The other young man tied a cord around his own waist and they walked down to the water’s edge.

Emma stood between them and they looped the cord around her waist, tying her firmly in the middle, a human sandwich. When the knots were tight, the boys each took one of her hands and they began to slowly wade against the roaring current. The water inched past their knees, then their waists, then up to their chests, beating hard against their bodies. They strained against the current. Emma closed her eyes, feeling the stone riverbed with her feet, trying for all she was worth to hold on. Step by slippery, precarious step.

Her head was swimming. She opened her eyes, but couldn’t look at the current that was trying to suck her downstream. She tilted her chin back and stared up at the sky instead, and squeezed the boys’ hands.

One of the young men, Sargent, would say fifty-seven years later that he was so scared crossing that river that he still visited it in his dreams at the age of seventy-nine. “We were touch and go getting across,” he would say. The other, Bell, would recall how fast the water was flowing, and how he felt that one misstep would send them all rushing downstream, tangled in rope. They’d both come back decades later to hike the same ground, and they’d fondly remember Emma’s friendly, determined nature. “She was one tough old bird,” Bell would say.

That day, though, there in the middle of the rushing water, so close to catastrophe, Emma Gatewood laughed out loud at how ridiculous it was that a sixty-seven-year-old woman had gotten herself into such a predicament.

They finally reached dry ground and scrambled up the bank. She ducked into woods to change from her wet Bermuda shorts and back into her dungarees.

“Well,” she said, reappearing, “you got grandma across.”

AUGUST 16–20, 1955

The folks at the Long Trail Lodge were expecting her, and when Emma arrived at the hotel near Killington, Vermont, that afternoon, they fixed her a sandwich in the kitchen then put her on the phone with a reporter from the
Rutland Herald.
Rutland was about nine miles west.

It seemed like the whole country wanted to know what she was up to now, and reporters were following her every move. If the first three-quarters of the journey had been considered a novel attempt at greatness by an eccentric old lady, now that she was on the home stretch, she had captured the attention of the country. An Associated Press dispatch went out the next day, reporting that Emma had lost twenty-four pounds and worn out five pairs of shoes. “So far
she has walked 1700 miles,” the article read, “with about 350 miles more to go to Mt. Katahdin.”

Three hundred fifty miles left. What the article didn’t mention was that the miles before her were some of the most difficult, perilous miles on the trail. She had faced cold nights in the South in the spring, but there were nights ahead when the temperature would drop below freezing and the skies would spit stinging sleet. She’d averaged roughly fifteen miles a day so far, but her daily mileage would be cut to a third of that once she reached the White Mountains of New Hampshire, just ahead. And as northbound
hikers before her had learned, there were long stretches, including the daunting 100 Mile Wilderness, which were so isolated and inaccessible that carrying enough food to survive for a week or more was a necessity.

Emma figured she might as well get started.

She followed the narrowest path she’d encountered so far— “About like a squirrel would use,” she thought—up and over and around some boulders and into Gifford Woods State Park. Earl V. Shaffer stayed at the same park seven years before, on his inaugural thru-hike in 1948. “There I signed the register, then talked to Grace Barrows, the first and only lady Ranger met on the Long Cruise,” Shaffer wrote later. “She told me that the lean-tos in the Park were available at a nominal fee. But several hours of daylight remained and I decided to keep going. Mrs. Barrows misunderstood and always blamed herself for my going. She told me years later that she never charged a through-hiker after that, regardless of regulations.”