Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (19 page)

Alas, when Emma arrived, Mrs. Barrows, conflicted, said she did not like to charge, but as it was a state park she was required to charge a dollar. Emma didn’t mind and fetched a dollar from her pocket, even if she planned to sleep in the grass.

“To ease her conscience,” Emma wrote in her journal, “she brought me a tray of hot baked potatoes, slices of ham, beets, bread, two slices of jelly roll, glass of milk, and hot coffee.”

Mrs. Barrows mentioned that two young men had come off the trail and reserved the adjacent table on which to sleep. Emma was delighted to find it was the navy boys who helped her across the creek. She gave them her drip coffee, some crackers, a piece of jelly roll and some cookies to supplement their dinner. They all stayed awake a while talking and then Emma went to sleep on a big pile of leaves. In the night, she felt a couple of cold sprinkles on her face and she quickly grabbed her sack and headed to the porch of the caretaker’s home. The boys trudged up onto the porch a few
minutes later, good and wet. A few other men who had been working on the trail had made their beds on the tables, so Emma lay on the floor. Soon enough, the rain started falling harder and blowing under the overhang and the porch floor grew wetter by the minute. Emma climbed upon a table and the navy boys doubled up on another. None of them got much sleep.

As they dried their clothes over a fire early the next morning, Hurricane Diane was plunging into the East Coast eight hundred miles south, not far from where Hurricane Connie had made landfall five days before. The storm was packing winds of one hundred miles per hour near the eye and moving west at fourteen miles per hour, but observers were already saying that Diane wasn’t going to cause nearly as much damage as Connie. Houses had been damaged by waves and streets were flooded in coastal towns, but the storm didn’t pack the punch of its predecessor. It quickly began losing steam, so much so that hurricane warnings were expected to be called off that afternoon. What the forecasters weren’t taking into account, however, was that the storm’s path would keep it centered over the coast, so it continued to suck up moisture from the Atlantic and sling it inland, onto ground still saturated by Connie.

On the trail, the hikers were oblivious. News came by word of mouth, and with the Washington Weather Bureau downplaying the storm already, there wasn’t any alarm, even when the storm started tracking north.

A volunteer who had been clearing the trail came with bad news: a beaver dam had caused flooding and the valley below was impassable. He knew Emma was hiking the trail, and he told her there was no way she could cross the flooded stretch. He offered to drive her around it and she accepted. Faced with an impassable obstacle, these two miles were the only on the A.T. she’d miss.

On August 18, Emma headed east toward the Connecticut River, the dividing feature between Vermont and New Hampshire,
and in the evening she walked into a town called Hartland and looked for a store to stock up. She talked to the proprietor for a few minutes and he told her she could probably find her a place to stay about half a mile or so off the trail.

She followed his directions and was headed down the road when a car pulled up beside her. A woman asked Emma her name, then said they had been searching for her. The woman was Mrs. Ruetenik, and they were from Ohio. When they saw the newspaper story and realized Emma was so close and would be coming down the trail soon, they set out to find her. Mrs. Ruetenik asked if Emma needed a place to stay the night and offered her a bed in a cabin they were house-sitting for some friends. Emma accepted the invitation and piled in the car and rode with them a few miles to the mountainside home, which had a lovely view of the countryside. Mrs. Ruetenik had a baby and a few small children, but she didn’t seem worried at all about her ragged company. She served Emma hot dogs and tomatoes as they sat outside and enjoyed the view.

Meanwhile, to the south, the outer bands of Hurricane Diane, which had been downgraded to a tropical storm, were dumping water on New England as they moved north. Nobody seemed too concerned about the menacing clouds, but they soon began to understand that the new rainfall was rapidly filling smaller rivers and streams. It wasn’t until late in the afternoon that the first flash-flood warning was issued. As people across the region went to sleep to the sound of rain pattering their roofs, the water began to rise.

The mayor of Milton, West Virgina, didn’t know Emma’s history, didn’t know about P.C. or the decades of abuse or the details of
their final fight, but he knew a battered spouse when he saw one. And he knew that a fifty-three-year-old woman with broken teeth and a cracked rib did not belong in jail.

He talked to her for a while and felt sorry for her. The miscarriage of justice had to be corrected. He invited Emma to stay in his home, safe and protected, until she got back on her feet. He got her a job working in a restaurant for some spending money.

Back home, the children were in a state of confusion. Their mother had sent word that she was OK, and that they’d be together soon, but the three still at home—Nelson, Louise, and Lucy—didn’t know what to expect next.

They got up early one morning and, with the help of a few neighbors, killed and cleaned a hog. They built a fire under a barrel of water and strung the hog up before it was time for the kids to go to school. When they arrived home from school that afternoon, their father was gone. P.C. had taken the bedroom sets and furniture and nearly everything they owned out of the house. There on the table was half of the hog carcass, a parting gift.

Nelson, the oldest still at home at fifteen, had been working as an assistant to the janitor at school and he had always been tight with his money. His older sister Esther once asked him if he’d like a little spending money, and when he said he would, she gave him a dime. A few weeks later, she asked him if he needed a little more and he replied, “No, I still got that dime.” He had eventually saved up enough money to buy a Remington single-shot, bolt-action rifle and a bicycle with a headlight and fenders for twenty-six dollars from Montgomery Ward in Huntington. Now he found some pocket change and rode that new bicycle three miles to the general store, where he phoned his mother and told her that their father was gone.

You want me to stay and help get things straightened up tomorrow?
he asked her.

No, go on to school,
she said.
I’ll be on the first bus.

When the children stepped off the bus the next day, Emma greeted them. She had put the meat away and organized the house. She had taken care of everything and carried on without mentioning the recent chaos, as though she’d never left.

She was planning to ask a judge for a peace bond, which would require P.C. to keep his hands off her, but she learned that he had hired a lawyer to dispute her claims. So she hired a lawyer, too, and on September 6, 1940, at the big stone courthouse in Huntington, West Virginia, Emma Gatewood, after thirty-five years of matrimony, filed for divorce.

Five months later, on February 6, 1941, Emma and her lawyer appeared before a judge and divorce commissioner. Emma testified to the discord in her marriage, to the abuse she had suffered and the ways in which she had been mistreated. After consideration, the judge issued his decree: “That the bond of matrimony heretofore existing between the plaintiff, Emma R. Gatewood, and the defendant, P.C. Gatewood, is hereby dissolved and the said plaintiff is hereby granted an absolute divorce from the defendant from the bond of matrimony.”

He awarded Emma custody of Louise, fourteen; Lucy, twelve; and Nelson, sixteen; and demanded that P.C. pay Emma fifteen dollars a month in alimony. He also awarded Emma the farm on Barkers Ridge and demanded that P.C. continue to make payments on it. If he failed to do that, he’d be called back to court.

Emma wrote later that she had been “happy ever since.”

“I know when I go to bed that no brute of a man is going to kick me out into the floor and then lie out of it,” she wrote.

But he wasn’t done causing her grief. He would fail to pay monthly alimony and run up a debt of two hundred dollars. Then, when she threatened to sue, he’d promise to deed her the farm and give her half of what he owed.

But she could deal with that. Their relationship was finally over. He would never again lay a hand on her.

Portrait, age fifty-four, 1942.
Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds

She crossed the Connecticut River into New Hampshire at Hanover and walked quickly through town, hoping that no one had alerted another newspaper reporter to her presence. She was beginning to tire of the consistent delays. To make matters worse, the reporter in Rutland a few days before had somehow gotten the idea that she intended to square-dance in front of the television cameras when she finished the trail. And CBS News had broadcast the error on television. She had no intention of square-dancing in private, much less in front of the American television-viewing public.

At least it wasn’t raining in Hanover.

She didn’t know it then, but the storm chasing Emma up the coast was causing massive devastation to the south as it slung a final black band of rain on New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. The storm had been nearly counted out by weathermen on Thursday; it looked like nothing more than a low-pressure system moving over New England. But it was still moving, rotating in a vast counterclockwise direction, sucking up warm and moisture-laden air from the Atlantic and pushing humidity in the Northeast to sultry, almost tropical levels. Then came a low-pressure trough. Wet air rose, cooled, expanded, and began falling across the region. Diane was not dead. Not yet.

In the early morning hours in Waterbury, Connecticut, where Emma had stopped to visit with Mrs. Clarence Blake two weeks before, floodwaters from the Naugatuck River had surged thirty-five feet in places, topping riverbanks and washing away bridges and homes, destroying businesses and sucking families into the raging water. Parents tied their children to treetops as they prayed for rescue. In Winsted, the serene Mad River smashed through town and isolated residents from rescuers. In Farmington, a rescue boat capsized, sending little Patricia Ann Bechard to her death, and a fireman
lashed little Linda Barolomeo to a tree before he was washed into floodwaters himself. In Seymour, the water unearthed caskets from a graveyard and sent them bobbing downstream. In Putnam, a magnesium plant caught fire and shot flames 250 feet in the air. Everywhere, police and firefighters were rushing from house to house, ordering residents to get out. The entire town of Ellenville, New York, population four thousand, was evacuated. But for many, the warnings came too late.

The rainfall totals in Connecticut were unbelievable. Fourteen inches in Torrington. Thirteen in Winsted. Twelve in Hartford. Nearly twenty inches fell in Westfield, Massachusetts.

The worst episode was playing out in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, near the Delaware Water Gap. The usually gentle Brodhead Creek rose thirty feet in fifteen minutes, plunging into a religious retreat called Camp Davis, where the campers fled to a house on higher ground. As water rose, they climbed into the second story, then the attic, until the house gave a shudder and collapsed. One woman would recall hearing children screaming hysterically as she clung to debris. She would later learn that thirty-one campers were dead.