Gatewood Emma Rowena Caldwell - Grandma Gatewoods walk: the inspiring story of the woman who saved the Appalachian Trail

EMMA GATEWOOD TOLD HER FAMILY SHE WAS going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than two hundred dollars. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, having survived a rattlesnake strike, two hurricanes, and a run-in with gangsters from Harlem, she stood atop Maines Mount Katahdin. There she sang the first verse of America, the Beautiful and proclaimed, I said Id do it, and Ive done it.

Grandma Gatewood, as the reporters called her, became the first woman to hike the entire Appalachian Trail alone, as well as the first person man or womanto walk it twice and three times. Gatewood became a hiking celebrity and appeared on TV and in the pages of Sports Illustrated. The public attention she brought to the little-known footpath was unprecedented. Her vocal criticism of the lousy, difficult stretches led to bolstered maintenance, and very likely saved the trail from extinction.

Author Ben Montgomery was given unprecedented access to Gatewoods own diaries, trail journals, and correspondence, and interviewed surviving family members and those she met along her hike, all to answer the question so many asked: Why did she do it? The story of Grandma Gatewood will inspire readers of all ages by illustrating the full power of human spirit and determination. Even those who know of Gatewood dont know the full storya story of triumph from pain, rebellion from brutality, hope from suffering.

Advanced Praise for Grandma Gatewoods Walk

Just as Emma Gatewood helped save the Appalachian Trail from years of neglect and preserve it for generations of hikers, Ben Montgomery has kept her unbelievable story alive for anyone who loves the outdoors, underdogs, heroic women, and amazing tales. I wish Id read it while standing on top of a mountain, but I almost felt as if I was.

Thomas Mullen, author of The Last Town on Earth

In Grandma Gatewoods Walk, a storytellers storyteller digs deep into the long-forgotten tale of an inspiring journey, bringing forth a transcendent story of dignity, independence, and the dynamic human spirit.

Michael Brick, author of Saving the School

With rich reporting and often poetic prose, Ben Montgomery takes readers on an intimate, backwoods adventure with a resolute old lady. Along the way, he explores the history of hikers and highways, the solace of nature and solitudeand the urge to escape.

Lane DeGregory, journalist, winner of the
2009 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing

Copyright 2014 by Ben Montgomery

All rights reserved

First edition

Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 9781-61374718-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Montgomery, Ben.

Grandma Gatewoods walk : the inspiring story of the woman who saved the Appalachian Trail / Ben Montgomery.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9781613747186 (cloth)

1. Gatewood, Emma Rowena Caldwell, 1973. 2. HikersAppalachian TrailBiography. 3. Women conservationistsAppalachian Trail Biography. 4. Appalachian TrailHistory. I. Title.

GV199.92.G35M66 2014

796.51092dc23

[B]

2013037551

Interior design: PerfecType, Nashville, TN

Map design: Chris Erichsen

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

For Jennifer

We do not go into the woods
to rough it; we go to smooth it.
We get it rough enough at home.

G EORGE W ASHINGTON S EARS

Now or never.

H ENRY D AVID T HOREAU

I get faster as I get older.

E MMA G ATEWOOD

Index

MAY 29, 1955

She packed her things in late spring, when her flowers were in full bloom, and left Gallia County, Ohio, the only place shed ever really called home.

She caught a ride to Charleston, West Virginia, then boarded a bus to the airport, then a plane to Atlanta, then a bus from there to a little picture-postcard spot called Jasper, Georgia, the First Mountain Town. Now here she was in Dixieland, five hundred miles from her Ohio home, listening to the rattle and ping in the back of a taxicab, finally making her ascent up the mountain called Oglethorpe, her ears popping, the cabbie grumbling about how he wasnt going to make a penny driving her all this way. She sat quiet, still, watching through the window as miles of Georgia blurred past.

They hit a steep incline, a narrow gravel road, and made it within a quarter mile of the top of the mountain before the driver killed the engine.

She collected her supplies and handed him five dollars, then one extra for his trouble. That cheered him up. And then he was gone, taillights and dust, and Emma Gatewood stood alone, an old woman on a mountain.

Her clothes were stuffed inside a pasteboard box and she lugged it up the road to the summit, a few minutes away by foot. She changed in the woods, slipping on her dungarees and tennis shoes and discarding the simple dress and slippers shed worn during her travels. She pulled from the box a drawstring sack shed made back home from a yard of denim, her wrinkled fingers doing the stitching, and opened it wide. She filled the sack with other items from the box: Vienna Sausage, raisins, peanuts, bouillon cubes, powdered milk. She tucked inside a tin of Band-Aids, a bottle of iodine, some bobby pins, and a jar of Vicks salve. She packed the slippers and a gingham dress that she could shake out if she ever needed to look nice. She stuffed in a warm coat, a shower curtain to keep the rain off, some drinking water, a Swiss Army knife, a flashlight, candy mints, and her pen and a little Royal Vernon Line memo book that she had bought for twenty-five cents at Murphys back home.

She threw the pasteboard box into a chicken house nearby, cinched the sack closed, and slung it over one shoulder.

She stood, finally, her canvas Keds tied tight, on May 3, 1955, atop the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, the longest continuous footpath in the world, facing the peaks on the blue-black horizon that stretched toward heaven and unfurled before her for days. Facing a mean landscape of angry rivers and hateful rock she stood, a woman, mother of eleven and grandmother of twenty-three. She had not been able to get the trail out of her mind. She had thought of it constantly back home in Ohio, where she tended her small garden and looked after her grandchildren, biding her time until she could get away.

When she finally could, it was 1955, and she was sixty-seven years old.

She stood five foot two and weighed 150 pounds and the only survival training she had were lessons learned earning calluses on her farm. She had a mouth full of false teeth and bunions the size of prize marbles. She had no map, no sleeping bag, no tent. She was blind without her glasses, and she was utterly unprepared if she faced the wrath of a snowstorm, not all that rare on the trail. Five years before, a freezing Thanksgiving downpour killed more than three hundred in Appalachia, and most of them had houses. Their bones were buried on these hillsides.

She had prepared for her trek the only way she knew how. The year before, she worked at a nursing home and tucked away what she could of her twenty-five-dollar-a-week paycheck until she finally earned enough quarters to draw the minimum in social security: fifty-two dollars a month. She had started walking in January while living with her son Nelson in Dayton, Ohio. She began walking around the block, and extended it a little more each time until she was satisfied by the burn she felt in her legs. By April she was hiking ten miles a day.