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_"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 AM. 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. 9 GOOD HARD LIFE 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." When she reached Route 17, Snow was waiting with a police officer's wife. They drove together to the officer's house for lunch, then back to the trail, where Emma and her new acquaintance started walking. They talked along the way, with Snow asking question after question. Emma told her she'd carefully avoided snakes and other critters. She talked about eating plants and berries, sustenance she found along the trail, and about relying on the charity of strangers. She mentioned that she'd met both nice and miserable people. She seemed serenely confident that she'd make it to Maine.
She told Snow something else. When she stood on top of Mount Katahdin— _if_ she made it to the top of Mount Katahdin—she planned to do something special. The trail was smooth and easy, and after five miles they reached a new stone shelter on Fingerboard Mountain. Snow told Emma she'd meet her the next morning at 9:30 on Bear Mountain, a few miles away, hard against the Hudson River. There were two boys at the shelter, which was built atop a huge boulder. It had a tin roof and fireplaces at both ends, and it was filthy. Emma decided to sleep outside instead, and she found a nice grassy spot on which to spread her blanket. The boys moved down behind a large rock, in some leaves. Emma felt raindrops in the night, so she grabbed her bag and scrambled through the dark to the shelter. She turned her flashlight on for the boys, who seemed content to sleep in the rain. She needed rest, though. She had to be up early to make it to Bear Mountain on time. And the climb ahead would be rough. Emma returned from California to a financial mess. P.C. had mismanaged the farm in her absence. They had no money to pay the mortgage and could not find a way to appease the creditors. In 1938, they had to let the farm go.
They bought the smaller George Sheets farm up the river from Crown City, Ohio, and moved in on May 30, but they would be gone by the following year. Something had gotten into P.C. He would not let Emma out of his sight. He refused to work unless she came along, whether it was building fences or pounding rock or cutting wood. Occasionally, Emma would slip a few sandwiches into a paper bag and take her two young daughters into the woods to hunt for wildflowers. They'd walk over hills and into valleys all day long, identifying bloodroot and windflowers, bluets and buttercups and trilliums. On one of their flower hunts near Possum Hollow, a gentle rain was falling, washing the woodlands, and they found a large, moss-covered boulder protruding from the earth, covered with delicate hepaticas. It was a sight they'd never forget. Emma would later write that her husband beat her beyond recognition ten times that year. The reporters gathered early near the observatory on Bear Mountain on July 28, a bevy of them with Mary Snow of _Sports Illustrated,_ to wait for Grandma Emma Gatewood, who would be arriving at 9:30 AM. Ten o'clock passed, then eleven, then noon, and there was no sign yet of Emma. The newspapermen and photographers began to peel away, one by one, disappointed and a bit worried about the old woman. Mary Snow held out, but ventured down the mountain for lunch.
Emma had walked as hard as she could to make it on time, but the section of trail was steep and her injury made the climb difficult. She caught up with a group of hikers, though, and asked them how far she was from Bear Mountain. _Seven miles,_ one of them said. They pointed to a peak on the horizon and off she went. By the time she arrived at the top, four hours late, all of the reporters had gone. Mary Snow and a tall policeman soon arrived and the policeman took photographs of Emma, hand on her hip, a green eyeshade pulled down over her nut-brown forehead, her sack slung over her left shoulder. A few tourists noticed and began snapping her picture as well. When the policeman was finished, Emma headed down the mountain and Snow met her in a car at the bottom and took her to a restaurant. That night Snow paid for a cabin in Fort Montgomery, on the west bank of the Hudson. Emma said goodbye, then washed her clothes and dried them by a fire and fell asleep. She had tried to find a map but had no luck, so the next morning at 6:00 AM she walked back to where Snow had fetched her and found the nearest white blaze and followed it toward the Bear Mountain Bridge, an impressive suspension bridge of steel and concrete, completed thirty-one years before. She noticed the railroad tracks running underneath the automobile lanes. She had never dreamed she would get to walk across the Hudson River on a bridge, but step-by-step she went as cars blurred by. She stopped in the middle, suspended between the water and the sky, to behold the sights. Downriver was New York City, and to the north was the United States Military Academy at West Point, where monuments to dead soldiers dotted the manicured grounds. It was here, during the Revolutionary War, that colonists stretched a giant chain across the Hudson to stop British ships from traveling upriver.
Across the bridge, she walked over swampy but level ground and stumbled onto a Girl Scout camp about 8:00 AM. The campers were still sleeping, so Emma routed them out from their beds. They'd intended to get up early to break camp. She pressed on and slept that night on a pile of leaves near the trail. She left again at 5:30 AM, thirsty and looking for water, and walked until she heard the gurgle of a stream. Following the sound she found a new well, but the water flowing out was muddy. She approached the house nearby and a woman kindly filled her canteen and offered Emma breakfast. Farther down the trail, near Stormville, New York, in the Fish-kill Mountains, she came to something called the Lost Village. It appeared to be a museum, so she wandered in. The Lost Village had been open just two months, and its proprietors had recently made the controversial claim that the American cowboy had originated there, a short commute from New York City, despite the legends of the West. Two city dwellers had found the place several years before, on a weekend trip upstate to look for land. They discovered several stone foundations and various pieces of pottery and iron kettles and, after reviewing some historical maps, decided to campaign publicly that the original "cowboys" were British cattle thieves who raided rich Dutch settlers from a lawless encampment on the mountain. It helped that the husband was a publicist and the wife a writer. The newspapers ran stories. The proprietors charged admission at the door.
Emma didn't dispute the claims. She looked around, then left, and jotted her feelings later in her diary. "Some things there were fakes, I am sure," she wrote. As the sun set July 30, she followed a side trail to the Ludington Girl Scout Camp, near Holmes, New York, the village from which the first thru-hiker, Earl V. Shaffer, had mailed his groundbreaking letter to the Appalachian Trail Conference. Emma introduced herself. The counselors asked her to stay, and after dinner they parked Emma in front of the fireplace and sat the girls at her feet, little ones in the front. She told them story after story about her trip. When she was finished, all the girls wanted her autograph. In a shaky hand, Emma signed every scrap of paper. She slept on a cot in a tent that night and the kitchen staff sent her away early the next morning with a full belly, a sack lunch for the trail, and a handful of bouillon cubes. She hiked the next day past Nuclear Lake and over Burton Brook and Swamp River and made it to another Girl Scout camp in Wingdale, New York, by nightfall and again enjoyed the company, and the dinner of steamed brown bread and celery.
On the first day of August, she left New York and entered Connecticut, the ninth state in which she'd planted her sneakers. She wanted to make it twenty miles up the Housatonic River Valley to Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, before dark, but despite walking hard all day, she hadn't reached town when the sky went black. As she was hoofing down the shoulder of a gravel mountain road, a car stopped beside her and a man with booze-hazed eyes looked her over. _Why in the world are you walking in such a place after night for?_ he asked. She told him she was trying to make it to town before dark. _Get in,_ he said in a demanding tone. _I'll take you to my sister's a half-mile down the road._ She hesitated. She wasn't sure she trusted him. _Get on in here,_ he said. _You can't get to Cornwall Bridge tonight._ She did as he said, but she wasn't sure it was wise. His appearance was dulled, and Emma was pretty sure he was full of strong drink, but he did what he promised. The man's sister, Mrs. Charles Moore, wouldn't hear of Emma going any farther that night.
Emma woke early and walked back to where the man had picked her up, then back to the Moores' for breakfast. She'd come this far without skipping a single step of the trail, and she wasn't about to start cheating. She hiked the five miles into Cornwall Bridge and poked into the post office to see if she had any mail. She didn't. She called the home of Patrick Hare, a local man she had met at Shenandoah National Park, but no one answered. She ate dinner at the home of Mrs. Clarence Blake, a correspondent for the local newspaper. The story in the _Waterbury Republican_ ran the next day, as Emma followed the trail along a picturesque ravine, past clear waterfalls, and under a tall hemlock canopy that excluded most of the sunlight, then through a plateau of giant boulders and into the majestic Cathedral Pines, an old-growth white-pine and hemlock forest with trees reaching more than one hundred feet into the sky. GREAT-GRANDMOTHER GUNS ALONG, the headline read. Blake noted that Emma had worn out three pairs of shoes and had lost twenty-four pounds in the three months she'd been walking. "Even the beginning of the hike was done on a spur of the moment basis. Mrs. Gatewood just started out equipped with a canteen, a 25-pound pack and some 'spending money,'" the article read. "Mrs. Gatewood has had no special training as a hiker, except for the good hard life of raising her 11 children on a farm in Ohio." The article spoke of her determination, and how she had established a pace of about seventeen miles per day, "rain or shine."
The shine part was easy. 10 STORM AUGUST 3–11, 1955 On the morning of August 3, sailors aboard the SS _Mormacreed,_ traveling off the coast of French Guiana, noticed unusually strong winds blowing in from the west. They carried showery, squally weather. Around the same time and several hundred miles north, a freighter called the _African Sun_ passed through a strong easterly wave that tossed the massive ship like a doll. At 10:00 AM, another vessel, the SS _Bonaire,_ radioed the National Weather Bureau in Miami, Florida, to report a falling barometric pressure and northeasterly winds blowing at more than forty miles per hour. Waves were breaking at twenty feet and it was becoming clear that a vortex had formed at the top end of the easterly wave. A hurricane was born. A reconnaissance plane spotted the eye of the storm, which was pushing winds at fifty-five knots and surging west-northwest over the warm North Atlantic waters at sixteen miles per hour, slowly increasing in size and intensity, sucking up moist tropical air from the surface and discharging cooler air aloft, breathing in and out and growing as if it were a living thing. When the eye of the storm passed fifty miles north of the northern Leeward Islands and Puerto Rico, maximum winds were estimated at 125 miles per hour and the storm had splayed heavy rain bands, like fingers, for miles in all directions.
In the coming days, Hurricane Connie would change direction, stall, spin north, then northwest, avoiding Florida and lining up to slam North Carolina and rake its way up the Atlantic seaboard toward southern New England, toward towns that would need new maps and people who would lose their lives and their loved ones and spend terrible hours clinging to treetops as floodgates crashed and rivers escaped their banks. In those slow days before the hurricane made landfall, though, before the obituaries had been written and before the nation's news magazines had questioned whether the weather of 1955 was the worst in recorded history, the people of New England set about their daily routines. The same was true for the stranger in the tiny town of Amesville, Connecticut, who woke at Eva Bates's house a little before six o'clock, slung her bag on her shoulder, and rejoined the Appalachian Trail. Emma walked until she came to a low, swampy stretch in the woods, where the mosquitoes rose from the earth in thick clouds. She slapped at them a few times and then hurried to higher ground, where she stopped to thin them out.
Sick of fighting the biting bugs, she walked into a town to pick up some repellant oil from a dime store. Salisbury, Connecticut, wasn't much more than a wide spot in the road, but years before, it was known as the "Arsenal of the Revolution." For two hundred years, men pulled iron ore from the ground and shaped it into implements and guns and cannons. As Emma was leaving town, a woman recognized her as the hiking grandmother from the newspaper and called out across the street. She invited Emma inside and served her milk and sweet cakes. A few minutes after she had started down the trail again, she saw a man standing in the road with a camera hanging around his neck. He asked her if he could take her photograph. She didn't mind. Ten minutes later, a reporter from the paper stopped her again and questioned her about the journey. This was becoming routine, and she wondered if she'd ever make it to Maine. She surged forward, up Lions Head at the southern end of the Taconic Range, up Bear Mountain, the highest summit in Connecticut, across the Sages Ravine, its waterfalls dancing over moss-covered rock, where she saw her first porcupine, then into Massachusetts, leaving nine states behind her now on day number ninety-three.
That afternoon, she hiked a ways with a pack of Boy Scouts, but by nightfall they had not found shelter and so the boys stopped to set up camp. Emma left them behind and climbed Mount Everett. There she found a fire tower but could not find a shelter. Everett's vistas were breathtaking, but it was too rocky to sleep on the precipice, so she went a bit farther and raked together a pile of leaves beside a boulder as darkness fell. Before she drifted off, Emma heard a voice. It belonged to one of the scout leaders. She got up and found them at the summit, flashlight beams shining through the trees, where they were searching for the shelter. Even with a trail map the leaders could not find it. They left the scouts with Emma and went stomping around in the darkness. The boys looked thirsty, and Emma had a little water in her canteen. She offered it to them, but they refused to take it. When the leaders returned, she went back to her trail-side bed of leaves. The rain started the next day, on August 5.
What was already a slow slog grew slower. Emma made it just two and a half miles in the morning. She met a man that afternoon, Joe Seifert of Newark, New Jersey, who was thru-hiking the trail in the opposite direction, from north to south. They talked an hour but the downpour grew so heavy they could not continue their conversation. After sunset, Emma noticed a cluster of three houses, but no one would invite her in. She climbed over another mountain in the rain and finally found a kind soul, a woman named Mrs. Norris. The next evening, after another day of hiking through the rain, she tried to stay with a man named Moore, but he didn't have room. He offered his car. She reclined in the seat and caught a decent night's sleep. It was better than a picnic table by a mile. The rain clouds parted momentarily the next morning and Emma hiked into Washington, Massachusetts, where Mrs. Fred Hutchinson started to fill her canteen, thinking she was a berry picker, until Emma spoke up and got herself invited to dinner, then to a nap on the couch, then to the obligatory newspaper interview, then to a night in a bed.
The morning of Monday, August 8, Emma traversed Warner Hill and Tully Mountain, near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and was approaching Dalton when Hurricane Connie reached its maximum intensity five hundred miles east of West Palm Beach, Florida, moving north-northwest at fifteen miles per hour, drawing a bead on the East Coast. Its winds were churning at 135 miles per hour near the eye, and gales extended 350 miles farther north. A navy reconnaissance plane measured the eye. It was forty miles wide. The pilot, Lt. Commander R. T. Pittman of Covington, Georgia, called Hurricane Connie "the biggest storm I've ever seen." Another, Lieutenant Alfred M. Fowler of Waterloo, Iowa, gave this description: In the eye, you would think you were sitting in the middle of a big amphitheatre. All around you in a huge circle were bands of white clouds. Below was a deck of stratocumulus clouds and above was the bright blue sky. We flew up to 10,000 feet and the walls of the amphitheater still rose above us.
It was hot and wet in the center, as well, full of eighty-six-degree tropical air. The National Weather Bureau issued small craft warnings for boats from Block Island, Rhode Island, to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, as people along the Atlantic Coast brought lawn furniture inside and stocked up on nonperishables and hammered storm shutters over windows. The bureau called it a "severe" hurricane, but no one yet knew the course the storm would choose. "We're sweating it out," Walter Davis, a storm warning forecaster in Miami, told the Associated Press. "Our best judgment is that Connie will be affected by the southern portion of the trough and will turn northward, then northeastward. Time will tell." By that afternoon, as Emma popped into the post office at Dalton, where the clerk recognized her and introduced her to everyone in the room, the giant storm rushed northwest, swelling, gaining strength. Warning flags flapped from Cape Lookout, North Carolina, to Norfolk, Virginia, and the tides grew by three feet. Seven hundred airmen from the air force, army, navy, and marines hustled to move planes and vehicles inland from the coast, to Spartanburg, South Carolina. Giant waves lapped at coastal beaches and gales of seventy-five miles per hour stretched three hundred miles north of the eye. The North Carolina Highway Patrol, Red Cross disaster specialists, and Civil Air Patrol personnel organized for rescue missions.
That evening, as Emma walked into Cheshire, Massachusetts, and checked in at Leroy's Tourist Home, something else had become evident in the Atlantic, as well. Ships traveling five hundred miles from the northernmost Leeward Islands, well behind the hurricane, were reporting new bands of heavy rain and east winds up to forty-five miles per hour. While Hurricane Connie slogged toward the coast, another threatening storm was developing in its wake. The second storm had forecasters baffled. Would it peter out and disappear in the Atlantic? Would it weaken as another trough passed to the north? Or would it intensify and follow Connie toward the United States, setting up a nightmarish situation for the people along the coast? Before her, through the dark and low-slung clouds that raced north on the morning of August 9, stood the highest point in Massachusetts: Greylock Mountain. If the Berkshires behind her were light and inviting, Greylock, at 3,491 feet, served as a domineering challenge. The mountain inspired some of the greatest authors of American literature. Herman Melville drew inspiration from Greylock while working on _Moby-Dick,_ 105 years before Emma marched through. He thought the mountain looked like a whale, and he had a view of it from his writing room in Pittsfield. Henry David Thoreau wrote about his 1844 climb in _A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,_ summiting the mountain a year before his experiment at Walden Pond. There was, no doubt, something special about the mountain, but the two men took distinctly different views. The themes in _A Week_ and Melville's "The Piazza," a story set on Greylock, both involve a man on a quest who meets a woman. To the narrator in "The Piazza," the woman, a "fairy queen sitting at her fairy-window," represents a disappointment; he had climbed the mountain to investigate the magical source of light he had seen from town below, and he finds an orphaned, isolated girl who had been wondering from afar about a similar curious light coming from his house down below. For Thoreau, the mountain woman had "lively sparkling eyes" and was "full of interest in the lower world from which I had come" and he thinks of "returning to this house, which was well kept and so nobly paced, the next day, and perhaps remaining a week there, if I could have entertainment." Scholars would wonder for decades to come about the opposing views of Greylock, of nature represented by a woman on a mountain. But rare would be the conversation about why both female characters were stagnant and isolated from the world below.
Here came another sojourner, more than a century later, this time a woman with the wind at her back, summiting Greylock at noon and finding a mountaintop restaurant where she sat to enjoy a hamburger, a glass of milk, and, for dessert, a bowl of ice cream, before making her descent toward North Adams and bedding down in the wild beside the trail, completely comfortable. She continued through the Berkshires the next day, and randomly three high school boys and six girls joined her as she ventured through a valley and into the forest. They were talking and laughing as Emma told them about her trip. _I wish my grandmother was like you,_ said one of the girls. Emma felt like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Around dusk, the girls headed back, but the boys continued walking with Emma. They led her to a freshwater spring and collected leaves to make her a bed nearby. Then they wished her well and headed back up the trail. She wrote about the boys and girls in her diary, and how much fun she'd had, and she relaxed on the leaves and finally found sleep.
That night as she dreamed, eight hundred miles to the south, monstrous waves began licking the coast between Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Wilmington, North Carolina. The tide surged five feet, six feet, seven feet—higher than normal—and the ravishing winds began flicking shingles off beach cottages and lifting boards from fishing piers and ripping tree limbs from branches. As the eye of the storm neared land it threw tornadoes across the low country, bouncing around South Carolina tobacco towns such as Conway, Latta, Dillon, and Bucksport, where one cut a swath two hundred yards wide and a quarter mile long, injuring a woman, her two daughters, and her son. Another twister dropped near Goldsboro, North Carolina, 150 miles north, damaging a tobacco barn and exploding the dwelling occupied by a man, his wife, and their three children, who were not injured. Along the coast, evacuees by the thousands packed into churches and schools and other structures made of concrete farther inland. Farmers sealed up tobacco barns. Hospitals turned to auxiliary power. The navy secured its battleships. The National Guard evacuated two thousand coastal residents of New Bern, North Carolina, to higher ground. One hundred miles east of Boston, Massachusetts, construction workers were scurrying to sink and secure the massive legs of a radar island.
The storm slowed for a spell off the coast, sucking up moisture, cooling a little, and by the time the eye reached land near Morehead City, North Carolina, it was bursting with one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds and rainfall for the record books. It ripped off roofs and carried houses to sea. It chewed up fishing piers made of steel. And it slowly began to set a new course, turning toward the north, toward New England. About twelve hundred miles behind the beast, closer to the equator, the winds of the second storm were quickly growing, and observers noticed a large cyclone circulating northeast of the Leeward Islands. They gave it a name: Tropical Storm Diane. A reconnaissance plane flying over the new storm measured steady gusts nearing fifty miles per hour and intensifying. Rain was falling when Emma woke, trailside, early on August 11. She hiked alone in the morning and was quickly soaked through, head to sneaker. She sloshed across the state line, leaving Massachusetts behind and entering Vermont on the Long Trail through the Green Mountains, toward the higher and more rugged section of the Appalachians, and the path was made horrible by the rain. Her shoes picked up mud and made walking hard and dangerous at times. In the afternoon she was joined by a pack of Boy Scouts; she didn't mind the company so she kept pace with the teens. She noticed one of their leaders occasionally watching her walk, as if he were studying the old woman's gait for lessons. After a while, he spoke up. He complimented Emma on her walking, and said her energy and determination to finish what she had started were admirable. She liked to hear that.
The Boy Scouts broke off and Emma hiked alone for a stretch, the clouds still soaking the earth, finally coming to a shelter near a mountain pond. Two young men, in their early twenties, had already claimed the little cabin for the night. They'd started a fire and were cooking dinner when she walked in, sopping wet. They didn't seem too happy to see her come along, but it was obvious there was no way she was leaving. Harold Bell had just gotten out of the navy and Steve Sargent had left the US Naval Academy at Annapolis. They were hiking the Long Trail from Massachusetts to Killington, Vermont, doing some fishing and exploring along the way. They were surprised to see an elderly woman on this rugged, isolated section of trail, but they invited her in and made small talk. The young men were blown away that she had hiked all the way from Georgia, and even more surprised that she was carrying a shoulder sack that weighed less than twenty pounds. For ten days of hiking, the navy boys had each packed fifty-five-pound backpacks, and they felt a little foolish.
When it was time for bed, they hung blankets from the ceiling to divide the room. Like many of those Emma met along the trail, the young men would remember her for the rest of their lives, because of that chance meeting, and even more so because of what would happen a few days later, when they saw her again. 11 SHELTER AUGUST 12–13, 1955 That Friday was the rainiest August day in the written history of New York City. And what was left of Hurricane Connie, which made landfall at Morehead, North Carolina, before scraping up the Atlantic Coast, had just begun its onslaught in the Northeast. Ten people in the metropolis already were dead from the floods, a number that would continue to climb. Between midnight Thursday and midnight Friday, Connie dumped nearly six inches of rain on New York. Faced with flooding in various parts of the city, sixty thousand volunteers in New York's civil defense program were on standby. The headline in the _New York Times_ read, CONNIE BLOWS NORTH WITH FORCE EQUAL TO THOUSANDS OF H-BOMBS.
Behind the storm was a path of waterlogged destruction. In Wilmington, North Carolina, city hall was flooded by eighteen inches of water. Near Hampton Roads, Virginia, hurricane winds had slammed two freighters together. Seventy Red Cross shelters in the Carolinas held 14,756 refugees. Much of the tobacco and corn crop had been ruined. At North Beach, Maryland, a young woman staggered out of the choppy Chesapeake Bay and collapsed on shore, and locals sounded an alarm. Wreckage from a sixty-four-year-old schooner called the _Levin J. Marvel,_ which had been carrying tourists on a cruise, began to wash up. By the end of the day, a coroner had laid out ten bodies, still wearing life preservers, at the North Beach fire station. Behind Connie, too, was another storm. In the darkness between August 11 and 12, the season's fourth hurricane curved abruptly to the northeast and picked up speed. The intensification was so rapid that overnight the winds increased from 50 miles per hour to 125 miles per hour.
The rain bands north of Connie covered virtually all of New England, dropping eight inches of rain on Connecticut in just two days. To the north, the rain running off the Green Mountains and White Mountains rapidly filled brooks and streams, which began to crest their banks and picked up velocity as they flowed downhill and fed into larger creeks and rivers. Two hundred miles north of soaked New York City, Emma woke in a cabin in the woods, happy to have dry clothes thanks to the little fire. The navy boys were planning on sticking around the cabin to do some fishing, so she bade them good-bye and headed down the trail in a light rain. In the daybreak she could see that the nearby pond had swollen during the night and was pouring out over the trail. A wooden bridge across the stream was now a series of floating logs and she got her feet wet immediately while trying to get across. She wore a plastic cape around her shoulders but soon realized it was no use trying to stay dry. Minutes into her hike her clothes were soaked, and the wetter her sack got, the heavier her haul.
She had heard about a nice, well-kept shelter on Bromley Mountain, and for most of the hike she fantasized about getting out of the rain, drying her clothes, and having a hot bite to eat. In the late afternoon, when she came into a clearing and saw the shelter, Emma stopped in her tracks and gaped. Even from the outside, it appeared to be the most down-at-the-heels place she could imagine. To begin with, the lodge was abandoned. The doors were off their hinges and the windows had been broken out. When she stepped inside, rain was pouring through holes in the roof. Porcupines had eaten big chunks out of the wood floors. The stove was unusable. She hung her wet clothes on an old ladder and stretched it over a fireplace. She got a fire going to dry out her things, but everything was so wet that she couldn't build enough heat. Disappointed though she was, she made the best of her surroundings. The water pouring in from a big hole in the roof made a decent stream in which she washed her clothes. Her sleep was intermittent. She couldn't keep dry in bed that night, due to the leaks.
In July 1939, P. C. Gatewood sold his second farm and announced to his family that they were moving to Barkers Ridge, West Virginia, where he had bought an even smaller patch of land on which he hoped to grow tobacco. The farm was in disrepair and the fences needed work, but a log cabin sat on the property and there was room for a few sheep. Emma did not want to leave Ohio, but there was no use in fighting. So they packed their things into the truck and moved across the river, eighteen miles east of Huntington. She cried quietly the whole way. The three children still living at home—Nelson, fifteen; Louise, thirteen; and Lucy, eleven—enrolled in school, and Emma got a job as a government monitor, her role to make certain no farmer planted more tobacco than he was allowed. She tried to make the best of her new life. She braided rugs and planted vegetables and found time to write poetry, rhymes that seemed to be longing for a better situation. She mailed back one untitled poem to her home newspaper in Gallipolis, which published it.
A home is made of many things, Books and papers and little strings, A comb and brush to fix one's hair, A mending basket, and easy chair. A clock, some music, the Sacred Book, A kitchen stove and food to cook. The sound of little feet about Up the stairs, and in and out. Little trinkets on the floor, Trains and cars and dolls galore. Children's clothes and children's beds, A kitty cat that must be fed. A dog to warn us with his bark, When someone bothers when it's dark. A mother that is kind and good, And patient with her little brood. A great big place must Father fill, Besides the paying of the bills. A Spirit there that brings together, In every trial and kind of weather. There must be kindness every day, If it's a home with shining ray. P.C. burned a mountain field and planted a small crop. Each Saturday morning, P.C. would leave with Armster Kingery and would not return until Sunday evening. His wife never asked him where he had been because she did not care. It was on a Sunday in early September 1939 that Emma Gatewood received her last beating at the hands of her husband. It was then that her endurance of his cruelty ended.
The details can't be found in the various biographical sketches that accompanied the honors bestowed upon her in later years. They are not found in any newspaper article or magazine story about her either, and there are hundreds. In fact, the woman who did not smoke or drink or curse would tell newspaper reporters she was a widow for years to come, even if P. C. Gatewood was alive and well in Ohio. The details of this dark time were kept by her family, and they did not speak often of it for many years. That September day, P.C. and Emma got into an argument that developed into their final fight. No one remembers what subject prompted the disagreement, and there is naturally some confusion about the order of events. What is known is that Nelson, fifteen, found his father assaulting his mother inside the home. He had beaten her in the face, which was swollen and bruised. Her upper and lower teeth were broken. Her left ear was black and a mole above her ear was ripped nearly off. One of her ribs was cracked.
Nelson, who had always been small for his age but was nearing 150 pounds of bone and muscle, grabbed his father, pinning P.C.'s arms to his sides, and lifted him off the floor. He told his mother to run and she did, out the front door and into the woods. Nelson held his father for a few more seconds, then released him, and P.C. ran in pursuit of his wife. When he couldn't find her, he returned and walked past Nelson to the stove, where he picked up an iron poker and raised it over his head. _Make your first swing a good one,_ Nelson told his father. _You're only going to get one._ The old man didn't swing. P.C. left that day, and Emma returned to the house in his absence. When he came back later, he was trailed by a deputy sheriff or justice of the peace. Some family members believe that P.C.'s friend, Armster Kingery, who held political clout in the region, pulled some strings to have Emma arrested. Whatever the case, P.C. parked his truck, climbed out, and walked purposefully toward the house, the lawman tagging behind. When he jerked open the front door, his wife was waiting with a five-pound sack of flour, which she heaved in his direction. The flour connected squarely with her husband's face and exploded into a cloud of white.
The four witnesses disagree about minor details, such as whether the flour incident occurred in the presence of the officer or preceded his arrival, but they collectively recall that Lucy and Louise were in a state of consternation. As the lawman walked their mother to his car, Louise ran inside to fetch her pocketbook. Lucy clung to her mother until the officer pulled her away. The deputy placed Emma into his car and drove her to the neighboring town of Milton, West Virginia, where she was booked on unknown charges and locked inside a jail cell. She had held her own, come what may. Her shoes were wet. Her socks were wet. Her dungarees were wet. Her shirt was wet. Her sack was wet. When she left the Bromley shelter early the morning of August 13, rain was still falling. Hurricane Connie had dumped record amounts of water on its course along the coast, the giant outer bands of its counterclockwise rotation dragging water from the Atlantic onto the land, and now it was moving toward the Great Lakes region. At 10:00 AM, the storm crossed the southeastern border of Pennsylvania, sideswiping New England and slashing a diagonal track across the Keystone State, the calm eye passing Harrisburg, over Pittsburgh and slightly northeast of Erie, before moving over Lake Erie and toward Ontario in Canada. The winds had slowed to fifty-five miles per hour, and weathermen had begun referring to Connie as a storm rather than a hurricane.
Still, the rain came. In two days, the storm had dumped more than nine inches of rain on New York City, bringing train traffic at Grand Central Terminal to a halt for hours. Much of Connecticut got eight inches. Power and telephone service was out for many in the region. The northern Appalachian Mountains, the Whites, Greens, Taconics, and Alleghenies were all saturated, and their streams were running wild, sending incredible amounts of water rushing downhill into the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers in Pennsylvania, the Delaware and Ramapo Rivers in New Jersey, the Delaware and Neversink Rivers in New York, the Potomac River in Virginia and Maryland, the Westfield River in Massachusetts, and the Naugatuck and Mad Rivers in Connecticut. Many of them were close to the flood stage, and there was another erratic storm a few days behind and headed north. On the Appalachian Trail through Green Mountain National Forest, Emma was not walking so much as wading, and atop the ridges the wind—remnants of the hurricane—was blowing strong. She steeled herself against the elements and trudged onward. For nine miles she sloshed through water, strong winds, and driving rain. She ducked out of the deluge at a little shelter near Mad Tom Notch and had a soggy lunch from her sack. She hiked on through the afternoon at a much slower pace than she would have liked until she came to another shelter, at Griffith Lake, a small pond near Peru Peak. The shelter was occupied by a group of young black men and two slightly older white leaders from a Roman Catholic parish in Harlem. The men explained that they'd come up for a wilderness trip and had found themselves stuck inside because of the storm.
Emma enjoyed their company, though she was surprised to see them on the trail. She read the newspapers every day, so she was well aware of the tension between the races in 1955, when one in ten US citizens was black. The previous May, the Supreme Court had outlawed separation of the races in public schools and launched a period of protest. It would be four months before the name Rosa Parks would enter the national conversation, but sparks of rebellion had begun to flare all over America as the federal government started to act in favor of equality. The Federal Trade Commission ruled that segregation in depot waiting rooms and on trains engaged in interstate transportation was illegal. A federal appeals court in Georgia, where the former governor wrote that "God advocates segregation," demanded Atlanta open its public golf courses to black golfers. A court in Richmond, Virginia, barred segregation on city buses. In many places, the advancements implemented by the government strengthened the resolve of whites to maintain the upper hand. In South Carolina, a Negro Little League baseball team won its way to the state championship, then found that fifty-five competing white teams had withdrawn. In Arkansas, a Baptist congregation fired a pastor who preached against segregation. In Miami, a group of politically prominent African Americans was thrown out of a hotel after it had arrived, by invitation, to an Abraham Lincoln birthday dinner held by local Republicans. And White Citizens' Councils, a less secretive and less violent version of the Ku Klux Klan, sprouted across the South to put political and social pressure on blacks who tried to assert their new rights.
Emma talked to the young men a while, telling them of her trip, and decided to press on since staying the night would have made the eight-by-twenty-foot shelter a little too crowded. She walked down an embankment and came to a rushing creek near Little Mond Pond. She couldn't cross there, so she hiked up into the woods until she found a log stretched across the flowing water. She balanced carefully and made it across without falling. She walked down the trail a bit more and found that a flooded brook had joined the trail at a flat, narrow stretch. The water was running a mill race straight down the path. She stepped into the flow, but the water came all the way to her knee on the very first step, so she backed out. The shelter with the group from Harlem would have to do. Emma came from a place that was nearly all white and completely segregated, but she did not discriminate. She taught her children to respect others, no matter their skin color or stage in life. She would not allow them to utter racial epithets and taught them to treat people as they wished to be treated themselves. One experience on the trail defined this attitude: An African American couple invited her to dinner, and when she was seated and served, they withdrew. She refused to eat unless they joined her, and she seemed embarrassed by their treatment.
Emma found the boys baking two pones of cornbread. They had fashioned a little stove and were cooking over hot ashes from a fire. When they finished, they ate one cake and saved the other to eat on the trail the next day. When it was time for bed, Emma squeezed herself into one corner and ducked under her blanket as the rain plinked off the roof. Before she dozed off, the young man next to her, apparently asleep, slung his arm across her body. She moved his limp appendage back. He did it again. She moved it back. He did it again. Six days before, the Reverend G. W. Lee, a respected minister and local official of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was killed by an unknown assailant in Belzoni, Mississippi. Seven days later, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy visiting family in Money, Mississippi, would be kidnapped and murdered and dumped in the Tallahatchie River after he allegedly whistled at a white woman. That very same day, August 13, a black man named Lamar Smith was shot to death in broad daylight within sight of the courthouse in Brookhaven, Mississippi, and police wouldn't be able to find a single witness to testify against the white men charged in his death.
And on the Appalachian Trail, inside a crowded little shelter in the Green Mountains of Vermont, an old white woman fell asleep under the arm of a young black man from Harlem. 12 I'LL GET THERE AUGUST 14–15, 1955 Her sons were strong swimmers, and when they'd finished working in the tobacco fields, they'd race off toward the Ohio River and plunge into the cool water, washing away the day's dust and sweat. It was a good distance to the opposite bank, but when they were up to the challenge they could tear across the river and reach the other side, as if they were born with gills. Their mother could not swim. She'd never learned how. If you dropped her into the Ohio, she could probably keep her head above water for a few moments out of sheer grit and determination, but she lacked the fundamentals of buoyancy. She never spoke to her family of the months she spent preparing to hike the Appalachian Trail, but they'd later learn from friends and acquaintances in southern Ohio that Emma was often seen in the woods in advance of her journey. Her children would learn that she secretly made overnight expeditions to the wilderness to determine what equipment was completely necessary, what foods were lightweight and would help her maintain energy, and what first-aid supplies she might need in an emergency.
Despite those hours spent in forethought, she had never picked up the skill that would have proved mildly comforting at least on August 14, as the creeks and streams in the Green Mountains continued to rise. Emma set out at about 8:00 AM with the young men from Harlem and their leaders, and they waded through water to their knees for much of the trail that morning, coming eventually to a fast-moving creek that was fifteen feet wide. They gradually stepped into the water, which came above Emma's knees. They slowly worked their way across, the leaders keeping a close eye on the young men. They used walking sticks to brace themselves against the swift current until they'd each made it to safety. A short time later, they came to Ten Kilns Brook, which intersected the trail, and this stream was swollen as well, twenty feet from bank to bank. In the middle was a large rock, and the water between them and the rock wasn't flowing as rapidly as it was beyond the rock. The leaders went first, carefully maneuvering to the other side. Then the boys started, walking first to the rock then grabbing hold of a pole held by one of the leaders and inching the rest of the way across against the heavy flow.
Emma was last. She baby-stepped through the calmer water to the rock, then heaved her pack across to one leader and gripped the pole for the rough stretch. When she stepped into the swift water, it nearly took her feet from under her. She held tight to the pole and kept moving, feeling the creek bottom with her feet, trying to keep her balance, until she reached the other side. The rain stopped that morning. The sun burned down. Emma's soaked clothes began to dry, and gradually things seemed a little better. The group stopped at Old Job Shelter for lunch, and the boys laughed as they pelted green apples off a nearby tree. A few hours of hiking later, their clothes had dried completely, and they walked across a rustic wooden bridge to a shelter on a little island. It was a beautiful spot where the mirrored waters of Little Rocky Pond, stocked full with rainbow trout, reflected mountains covered by evergreens. 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: PAT ON THE BACK.
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." 13 DESTRUCTION 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."
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. Stroudsburg was isolated for ten hours. Across the region, flooding rivers washed away seven bridges. A fleet of helicopters rescued 235 passengers from a stranded Lackawanna Railroad train in the Pocono Mountains. In nearby Milford, two men, tied together by ropes, found an elderly woman stranded in her apartment and carried her to safety.
President Eisenhower would declare six eastern states disaster areas in need of federal relief. The combined death toll for both storms would climb above two hundred and the damage would be estimated at well over $1.5 billion, the highest on record. But around noon on August 20, the rain began to subside and the rivers grudgingly receded toward normal channels. The flooding failed to spread much father north than Northampton, Massachusetts. In Hanover, New Hampshire, where tourists had holed up in motels because routes to the south were flooded or impassable, Emma walked on through town, unaware of the death and chaos spread out behind her. She saw a couple of girls playing tennis in a park in town and she asked them if they wanted to go on a hike. The girls didn't answer and Emma continued down the road. Two blocks later, she heard someone running up behind her. The girls had followed her. They wanted to know if she was the woman hiking from Georgia to Maine who they had heard about. Emma told them who she was. She asked if they knew of a place to eat outside town, but they didn't. One of the girls insisted Emma come home with her to have lunch. Emma thought the girl's mother might be upset by a surprise guest, but she followed them back to the courts anyway. The mother was somewhat taken aback, but she made the best of it and drove them all home for sandwiches.
When her husband walked in the front door, he shook Emma's hand like he knew her. She didn't know why until he fetched his copy of _Sports Illustrated._ She had not yet seen the story, so she read it there. The man, Dr. Lord, phoned a friend who belonged to the Dartmouth Outing Club and asked if Emma could stay in one of their cabins along the trail. His friend was receptive. He said the trail was clean most of the way to the cabins and that she'd find them easily. After lunch, Dr. Lord drove Emma back to where she had left the trail. When she got to the outskirts of town, a woman and some teenagers were there, waiting to meet her. They visited for a while and when Emma decided it was time to press on, the teenagers, two girls and three boys, rode their bikes beside her down the road for two miles. One of the girls insisted on carrying Emma's sack in her bike basket. Emma never found the "clean" trail that Dr. Lord's friend had mentioned. Instead, she hiked through weeds that stretched well above her head. When she came to a clearing, she noticed that an envelope had been pinned to a post beside the trail. Upon closer inspection, her name was written on the envelope. Inside was a note from a woman who lived in a red house just off the trail. The woman wanted to invite Emma in for tea.
The invitation made her happy. She felt like a dignitary. She joined the woman for dinner, then the woman's husband, George Bock, told Emma how to get inside the Dartmouth Outing Club cabins. She arrived before dark and got a good night's rest on a real mattress. At noon the next day, as she came to a highway, she spotted a man waiting with camera gear. _You boys always seem to find me,_ she said. He introduced himself as a photographer, Hanson Carroll, from the nearby _Valley News_. He had been trying to track her down for a few hours. He first heard she had come through Hanover that morning, so he talked to Burdette Weymouth at the Hanover Information Booth, who showed him where the trail went up and over Moose Mountain. Not being endowed with the same energies as Emma, Carroll drove around Moose Mountain and waited along Lyme-Dorchester Road for her to come out of the woods. Within an hour, she came down the hill and into the road, tan and smiling. He asked Emma whether she would mind if he took a few photographs and filmed her hiking. She said she didn't. He took what must've been a hundred feet of film, shots of Emma eating lunch by the trail sign, walking along the road with two little girls and a boy, walking alone. She told him she had already worn out five pairs of sneakers. She was wearing her sixth. They talked about all the attention she was receiving and he asked her if it bothered her. She explained that she was not adverse to publicity, so long as the reporters didn't take up too much of her time.
He got the hint, but he asked her one more question. _Why are you doing this?_ _Just for the heck of it,_ she said. Hanson Carroll's story ran in the _Valley News_ on Monday, August 22, 1955. Its place on the front page was a curious, haunting reminder of how close Emma Gatewood had been to danger. The bold headline at the top of the front page read: PESTILENCE THREATENED AS FLOOD'S TOLL IS COUNTED. The smaller headline read: DAMAGE THOUGHT TO BE MORE THAN $1 BILLION; EIGHTY-SIX KNOWN DEAD. Below the headline was a photograph of Emma, smiling, sitting in the grass and touching a sign that said APPALACHIAN TRAIL. Below the photograph was another headline: GRANDMA WALKS APPALACHIAN TRAIL FOR "THE HECK OF IT" 14 SO MUCH BEHIND AUGUST 22-SEPTEMBER 11, 1955 Emma woke in the dark atop Mount Cube, its open ledges offering spectacular views both back down over the valley toward Hanover and to the north toward Mount Moosilauke and the White Mountains. She stood atop the pinkish-gray quartzite, which reminded her of granite or marble, and looked out upon what many hikers considered the most rugged part of the trail.
Besides the dangerous terrain, the White Mountains—and the Presidential Range in particular—were famous for unpredictable, erratic, wicked weather. The range was the collision point for several valleys that funneled winds from the west, southwest, and south. It was also at the center of multiple storm tracks that brought weather from the Great Lakes, the Appalachian Valley, and the Atlantic. "The Highlands of New Hampshire have a bleak ruggedness that commands the respect of the hardiest mountaineer," wrote Earl V. Shaffer, in _Walking with Spring,_ his book about his inaugural thru-hike in 1948. "Some of the worst weather on earth occurs here, with winds of more than gale velocity and temperatures of polar intensity. Freezing weather is possible in midsummer and a snowstorm can follow hot weather within an hour.... The results can be overwhelming. Many people have died because they didn't know or ignored these facts. Precautions should be taken. Scanty clothing should never be worn above timberline and emergency rations and gear should be carried."
Emma looked out on the horizon, toward Mount Washington, the highest peak in the northeast at 6,288 feet. Though not impressive compared to the world's tallest peaks, the mountain's blustery weather—with year-round temperatures averaging below freezing and average winds blowing at thirty-five miles per hour—had caught many hikers off-guard. The highest wind speed ever recorded—231 miles per hour—was atop Mount Washington, twenty years before. Winds blew so steadily stiff that shelters had to be chained and anchored to the earth. Hikers there had died from hypothermia, drowning, falling ice, avalanches, and falls. Two men, one in 1890 and the other in 1912, left the mountaintop on hikes and were never seen again. The year before her hike, two men died of hypothermia. The year after, two men would fall to their deaths, and one would be killed by an avalanche. By the time she arrived, some twenty-five people had perished on the mountain and scores of others had to be rescued. Emma didn't have any of the proper gear that Shaffer referred to, but what she brought in her sack had served her fine so far. She had been able to wash out some things the night before. She had also been greeted that night by a porcupine, a big thing, which came sniffing around her feet. She gave it a kick and thought it was gone, but a little later the porcupine climbed up and got right in her face. She switched on her flashlight and he scooted away, never to return.
She set out that morning, coming down off Mount Cube on a series of shaky ladders, a new experience for her, but she managed just fine. She walked to a farmhouse near the base of the mountain and knocked on the door. Peter Thomson was eleven at the time, but he'd never forget the experience. "My mother came and opened the door," he'd recall fifty-seven years later. "She said, 'Hi, my name is Emma Gatewood and I'm the first woman to walk the entire Appalachian Trail by herself.'" His mother invited the old woman in. Emma washed her hands and face and sat down to a home-cooked meal with the family. The two women would become good friends and pen pals, and Emma would visit several times in later years. She would inspire the elder Thomsons to take up hiking, and the couple would eventually summit all forty-six of the major Adirondack peaks, often accompanied by state troopers, for Meldrim Thomson Jr. would serve three terms as the mountain-loving governor of New Hampshire. His political success aside, for years to come he would open his home to Appalachian Trail thru-hikers, and his children would do the same, sending hikers on their way with maple syrup and a box of their mother's famous pancake mix.
In 1955, the man who would become governor took some pictures of his sons with Emma, and the boys followed her for quite a way down the trail to pick blackberries. She spent the night at Eliza Brook Shelter and hiked along a difficult, challenging stretch of trail the next day, climbing Mount Kinsman, then Mount Moosilauke, the most southern of the four-thousand-foot peaks in the White Mountains, where she came out above the timberline. The trail was marked by cairns, and the view across the bald boulder field was incredible. She didn't see a place to stay, so she followed a steep side trail that ran off the ridge, alongside Beaver Brook, and took her down seven treacherous ladders. She spent the night at a motel. _Emma with Thomson brothers (from left) Tom, seven; David, nine; and Peter, eleven; near the Thomson home in Orford, New Hampshire, on her first thru-hike in 1955._ Courtesy Peter Thomson She climbed back to the trail the next morning and walked over Cannon Mountain, where she saw the Aerial Tramway gracefully whisking loads of people from bottom to top of the magnificent peak. A few of the tourists waiting in a small park at the summit gaped and snapped Emma's photograph, as if she were an animal from the wilderness, as she walked through. She climbed down to Franconia Notch in the evening, dropped her sack on the porch of the only house she could see, and walked to a nearby restaurant for dinner. When she returned to the house for her sack, the folks there had gone for the evening, before she could ask permission to stay. A boy had mowed the lawn earlier and had raked the grass into a big pile by the road. Emma waited until dark before she hustled over and carried three big loads of grass to a secluded spot by some bushes, where she fluffed it into a bed. She was one hundred feet from the road, at least, but she didn't want anyone to see her sleeping outside like a vagrant, so she pulled her blanket up over her body and covered it with grass for camouflage. She was warm on a cold night and slept well.
On August 25, she hiked to Lafayette Campground, then walked back a little ways on the highway for a good view of the Old Man of the Mountain, a set of granite outcroppings on a mountainside in the shape of a man's face. The great orator and statesman Daniel Webster once said about the outcropping, "Men hang out their signs indicative of their respective trades; shoe makers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers a monster watch, and the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but up in the Mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men." The old woman of the mountains kept climbing, up and up the steep ascent of bald rocks, and finally came to the Greenleaf Hut on Mount Lafayette, where she got a bite to eat before continuing on to Galehead Hut, kept tidy by two college students, caretakers there, who kindly prepared her dinner. She walked to Zealand Falls Hut the next afternoon and got some food and raisins for the trail. She started again down the slope and walked a while before she realized she was lost. The trail was unmarked but clearly a trail, and so she kept going for several hours until she came to a little campground just as the sun was sliding behind the mountains. A man had set up camp there. When she explained her predicament, he offered to drive her back as far as he could, and she accepted. She walked a little farther in the night and slept beside the trail.
She made it the rest of the way back to the path the next morning and walked through a boggy plateau to Wiley House Station, then toward Mount Webster. The climb, from the beginning, was steep and rough. She came to a ladder where the rungs were so far apart that she had to plant one foot on the cliff face and pull herself up until she could get her knee over the next rung, then get her foot on it. It was difficult climbing. A few miles later she came to a spot where the trail stretched alongside a bluff, so close to the edge of a cliff that she was afraid she'd fall off. Falling happened to be the number one cause of death in these parts. The wind was strong, too—giant gusts of cold air coming up the face of the cliff. She tried to time the gales, waiting for a break so she could shimmy across. She worked up her confidence and then went for it, between gusts, and she made it behind a clump of pine trees to safety. She climbed Mount Jackson that afternoon, where she misread a trail sign and again took the wrong path. A woman she met on the trail put in a good word with the forest warden at Crawford Notch, and he let Emma stay the night with him.
The next morning, her knee was causing her pain, and though the days were bearably mild, the cold was slicing through the mountains at night. Emma knew she'd need extra provisions as August faded toward September. She made it to the scenic Lakes of the Clouds Hut, on the southern shoulder of Mount Washington, where she had lunch before summiting. The sky was bright and clear at the top and a large number of tourists had gathered to take in the sights. They gaped at the wrinkled, trail-stained woman suddenly in their presence. She wouldn't return the favor. Two boys walked up and sheepishly introduced themselves, then asked her questions about the trail. She set off again for Mount Adams, following the trail as it bent along the crest of the Presidential Range, above the trees. Her knee was still bothering her and the trail was rugged. In the evening, as she approached Madison Spring Hut, she heard a group of men, women, and children talking and laughing. When she got close enough she could make out about fifteen people in the group. She knew they saw her, and suspected they had been waiting for her, but she sat down on a rock behind some evergreens, being coy. She decided she'd make them come to her, and before long, they did. They had been expecting her, and they brought out their cameras to take her picture.
One of the women, Ruth Pope, gave Emma a bandage for her knee. Another, Jean Lees, gave her some wool gloves and a ski hat, which Emma stowed in her sack. They made her feel welcome and treated her with respect and kindness. The hut master didn't even charge her the six dollars for a bunk, and she thanked him by giving him her green eyeshade, autographed. She wrapped her knee in the morning, and the two women she met the night before volunteered to carry her sack. They broke off at Pinkham Notch and took a trail through Wildcat Mountains. When they found Emma again they were arguing about which one of them had carried the pack the longest. Emma reached Carter Notch after dark and accidentally stepped on her glasses. The frames were broken but she had brought along another pair, a lesson learned from her experience in Maine the year before. She tackled another mountain the next day, twice, because she misread signs; she blamed her own ignorance and a poorly marked trail. Her mileage had slowed considerably as she neared the Maine state line on account of her injury, the brutal climbs, and the occasional misdirection. A boy in the woods set her on the right path that day, and by then it was raining again.
When she reached the hut in the evening, she couldn't believe her eyes. The hut master had made a huge meal, and she was hungry. On top of that, they didn't charge her anything for the meal or the bunk. All her clothes were wet, so she made a dress from a blanket by forming pleats with safety pins. She made it work and dried her clothes by the fire. She topped Carter Dome the following day, August 31, and found Imp Shelter, which had a stove and made for a nice place to spend the last night of August. The next day she walked over Mount Moriah, onto the highway, and followed it into Gorham, New Hampshire, for supplies. She found supper and a nice bed at Androscoggin Inn, where Mrs. Tanner kept the big and beautiful white house. She left Gorham early and walked over jagged and rocky trail the next day, over Mount Hayes and Cascade Mountain, by Passage Pond and Moss Pond, up over Mount Success, and then, without any fanfare, she crossed the state line into Maine, climbing Mount Carlo. As the sun faded, she realized she had missed the shelter down below. She found two boys on the top of the 3,565-foot peak, sitting on rocks, but as darkness fell they descended toward the shelter she must have missed. The night was pleasant, so she scouted out a place to sleep outdoors and found a thick bed of moss that was perfect, the kind of soft a rich man with a trick back would pay to have made. She stretched out facing the sky.
The night was clear and the moon seemed close enough to touch. Its light fell on the short pines and the mossy bald around her. The stars were millions of pinpricks of light in a blanket of darkness. So much was behind her. So many memories and trials and miles. She'd made it into her fourteenth and final state, where September snowstorms weren't rare, where freezing temperatures could make even the heartiest mountain men call it quits and head for shelter. Maine was rugged. Maine was wild. In forty years, Maine would _still_ have more uninhabited forest than any other continental state. She couldn't have known it then, but much of America was pulling for her, clipping newspaper articles at kitchen tables and watching her traipse across the evening news on television, wondering whether she'd survive, this woman, in so mean a place. She carried their hopes along with her, but hers was a solitary walk—for peace, for serenity, for herself. She stood that night, all alone, just 280 miles from that little brown sign atop Mount Katahdin, her chest full of crisp air and inspiration, her feet firm atop a forgettable mountain where the stars make you feel insignificant and important all at once.
And she sang. In the late 1800s, just before Emma was born, an old man began walking clockwise on a nonstop 365-mile ovular route between the Connecticut and Hudson Rivers, a trip that took him precisely thirty-four days to complete. And then he did it again, and again— for more than thirty years. He was clothed entirely in leather. He had hand-made a suit, jacket, pants, and hat out of hide, and he came to be called "Old Leatherman." He slept in caves and natural shelters along his track where he kept gardens and stored food. Though he walked through dozens of towns, garnering enough attention after a few cycles that people set their watches by him, no one knew who he was. Although he was friendly enough to occasionally sit for a photograph, he didn't speak, and only once in a while grunted something low and unintelligible. Some thought he was French. A myth developed about his origins, one that was never proven. The story had it that he was born Jules Bourglay, in Lyons, France, and that as a young man he had fallen in love with the daughter of a wealthy leather trader. He asked the merchant for his daughter's hand, and the merchant struck a deal: if Bourglay would work for him for a year, he would give his blessing to the marriage.
Bourglay agreed. But the business soon failed, due mostly to several of Bourglay's bad decisions. The wedding was off. Crushed, the young man went into hiding, then disappeared to the United States, where he set out on his continuous trip to walk his lover out of his mind, or assuage his guilt, or maybe none of that. Who is to know? Every eccentric needs a story, and if one is not provided, one will be created. Despite Old Leatherman's mystique, Edward Payson Weston was probably America's most famous pedestrian. In 1860, he bet his friend that Abraham Lincoln wouldn't win the presidency. In 1861, he walked nearly five hundred miles, from Boston to Washington, DC, for Lincoln's inauguration, arriving a few hours late but in time to attend the inaugural ball. He launched his pro career a few years later, walking thirteen hundred miles from Portland, Maine, to Chicago in twenty-six days. Two years later he walked five thousand miles for $25,000. Two years after that, the showman walked backward for two hundred miles. He competed in walking events against the best in Europe. Once, in his old age, he staged a New York to San Francisco one-hundred-day walk, but he arrived five days late. Peeved, he walked back to New York in seventy-six days. He told a reporter he wanted to become the "propagandist for pedestrianism," to impart the benefits of walking to the world. A devout pedestrian, he preached walking over driving. Unfortunately, he was seriously injured in 1927 when a taxicab crashed into him in New York, confining him in a wheelchair for the remainder of his life.
Weston wasn't the first long-distance walker who gained attention for his physical feats. Many came before him, including Lieutenant Halifax, who walked six hundred miles in twenty days. Foster Powell walked two hundred miles from London to York, England, and back in five days. In 1932, a man seen walking backward in Berlin turned out to be a Texan attempting to walk around the world backward wearing special glasses affixed with mirrors. Later, in 1951, a New York couple claimed they had spent the previous twenty years walking city streets for a total of more than fifteen thousand miles. They said they had walked every single street of the five boroughs of New York City and had walked the varied boulevards of cities like Pittsburgh, Boston, Baltimore, and Denver. They became known as "America's Walkingest Couple." The celebrated Captain Robert Barclay, a Scot, deliberately walked a mile in each of one thousand successive hours. The challenge took six weeks in 1809. If a normal human walks three to four miles per hour, then Barclay's attempt to walk just one mile per hour for one thousand hours stood apart for the sheer difficulty in pacing. Once every hour, he walked a mile, and stopped to rest. Huge crowds came to watch, and journalists wrote of the event as though it were edge-of-your-seat entertainment.
Whether it was on a bet or to gain fame, to challenge oneself against nature or to pay amends for a lost love, those noted walkers—most all of them—had a purpose. In most cases, they let it be known. Mildred Lamb even wore a blue tunic that said PEACE PILGRIM on the front and 25,000 MILES ON FOOT FOR PEACE on the back. But the cases in which the motivations were held secret—as with Old Leatherman—observers, by nature, had to create a story to understand why one would set out on foot, leaving the shelters we build to plant us in civilization and set us apart from the world, the cars and houses and offices. To follow a path great distances, to open oneself to the world and a multitude of unexpected experiences, to voluntarily face the wrath of nature unprotected, was difficult to understand. Emma Gatewood was coy when people asked why, at her age, she had decided to strike out on the long trail. As America's attention turned more toward Emma in her final days on the A.T., as newspaper reporters ramped up their dispatches to update the public on her condition and whereabouts, she offered an assortment of reasons about why she was walking. The kids were finally out of the house. She heard that no woman had yet thru-hiked in one direction. She liked nature. She thought it would be a lark.
_I want to see what's on the other side of the hill, then what's beyond that,_ she told a reporter from Ohio. Any one of the answers could stand on its own, but viewed collectively, the diversity of responses left her motivation open to interpretation, as though she wanted people to seek out their own conclusions, if there were any to be made. Maybe each answer was honest. Maybe she was trying to articulate that exploring the world was a good way to explore her own mind. On the morning of September 3, a man appeared on the mountainside, east of the Maine state line. He was out of breath, and looked exhausted. Emma introduced herself. The huffing man asked how far away he was from the nearest lean-to, and she told him not too far. He said he was pooped from crawling through and climbing over rocks. He was carrying a large pack on his shoulders and he told Emma she was lucky hers was small. She soon found out what he meant. Before her was Mahoosuc Notch, widely regarded as the most difficult mile on the Appalachian Trail. The narrow notch was hemmed in between two rocky mountain walls, clogged with cabin-sized boulders and gnarly root clusters, and speckled by deep caves. She climbed slowly, carefully, over and under the slippery, moss-covered boulders, and at times she had to lumber her pack through tight crevices and climb through behind it. It took two hours to make it out of the notch, and she was worn out by the time she got through, but still she continued on a few more miles.
She slept the night at the shelter by Speck Pond, the highest lake in Maine, and woke the next morning to cold rain, pattering at first, then turning to fat, freezing, percussive drops that would make sane people scramble for shelter. She had blown out another pair of shoes, the side of one and the toe of the other. She had mended them with some string, but they wouldn't hold much longer, and they did nothing to protect her feet from the wet or the biting cold. She wasn't near any town, so she had no choice but to deal with the misfortune. She pushed over Old Speck Mountain, the state's third-highest peak and rough up and down, then through Grafton Notch and up Baldpate Mountain, which is topped by a slippery sheet of rock. Near the peak, at 3,662 feet, the cold rain turned to sleet, and she had to crawl on her hands and knees to keep from sliding off the face. To make matters worse, she was nearly blind. The only pair of glasses she could find had one lens, and it was fogged over. She cleared it constantly with her fingers or sleeve, but the world through one blind eye and one fog-tinted lens was an unusual and treacherous place. A misstep on much of the trail would've meant an injured ankle, but here on the sheer rock that was quickly accumulating ice, it could have meant plummeting to instant death. Or maybe that—instant death—would have been better than, say, winding up debilitated at the bottom of some hole, exposed to the elements, freezing or starving to death. She stepped carefully.
She came to a rock ledge about eight feet high, where she had to toss her sack to the ground below and climb down on a wet rope. She gripped it firmly, like she had held a thousand hoes, and slowly worked her way down. A little later, she arrived at a menacing crevice. The trail went straight across and, realizing she'd have to actually jump to the other side, she peered over the edge. Down in the pit, someone had painted a sign that read GO FAST. Emma tossed her sack across the gap and took a quick few steps on her bad knee and jumped, a great-grandmother aloft, then landed safely on the other side. It was dark by the time she came upon an old shack near Frye Brook. The placed looked to be an abandoned sporting camp. It was nice and clean, so she climbed in through a broken window and made herself at home. She spread out old magazines on the floor and lay down atop the thin pallet of pictures and words, bundled against the cold night. She walked across a paved mountain road the next day and noticed a man mowing along the shoulder on a tractor. Emma walked right up to him and introduced herself. He was Mr. Reed. She asked him how far it was to the nearest town where she could buy a new pair of shoes. He looked down and noticed the strings holding hers together.
_Six miles that way,_ he said, pointing, _or twenty miles that way._ She didn't want to walk that far for shoes, even if the pair on her feet wouldn't last much longer. The two talked for a while, and Emma explained what she was doing. Mr. Reed told her he had a pair of sneakers at his house that he'd let her have, but he lived twenty miles away himself. Reed figured that if she could make it to the next road that intersected the trail by evening, he could have his wife meet her with the sneakers. Emma was grateful. She said goodbye and headed off, over Wyman Mountain and Hall Mountain, down through Sawyer Notch and up over Moody Mountain. When she appeared on the road, there sat Mr. Reed's wife and daughter. They'd gone into town and bought Emma a brand-new pair of white sneakers. Emma loosened the laces and began to slide in one foot, but the shoes were much too small. Somehow Mr. Reed had misunderstood and given his wife the wrong size. Mrs. Reed apologized profusely and insisted Emma come to their home for the night. She said they'd bring her back to the trail in the morning, so Emma agreed. Mrs. Reed did Emma's laundry that night in their electric washing machine. The daughter called her friend, an avid hiker, and they made plans to accompany Emma the next day.
They made it back to the trail later than Emma would have liked on September 6, but she had enjoyed the company, and a warm place to sleep, so she didn't complain. The daughter and her friend set off with Emma, who was wearing new shoes, and took turns carrying her pack. They ate lunch at a shelter on Elephant Mountain, then hiked on, and though the trail was covered with blowdowns and obstacles, they all had an enjoyable day, putting in about ten miles. Mrs. Reed met them to fetch the girls. She had brought a camera along and took pictures of the girls with Emma beside an Appalachian Trail sign. Emma walked on, alone, to Sabbath Day Pond, where she slept inside a lean-to, then shot across some hilly terrain to the Piazza Rock lean-to, then, on a knee that was really beginning to ache, she leaned into the tiresome, steep climb up Saddleback Mountain, 4,120 feet high. The cold wind blew through her layers of clothing, but she sat anyway to eat a snack on Saddleback and absorb the incredible view from the open crest. She saw on the dark horizon the Boundary Mountains, dividing the United States and Canada. She sensed a storm moving in, and as the sun fell the cold hung hard around her. She made it to a lean-to at Poplar Ridge and hunkered down against the bite. She didn't know what the stretch just ahead held for her, but it had been damning to previous hikers. Not long before, the entire section had been closed, marked with a sign that warned, TRAIL CLOSED, IN BAD CONDITION TO BIGELOW. TRAVEL AT YOUR OWN RISK. This had been the last remote stretch of trail to be completed on the entire A.T.
In fact, the trail through Maine almost ended before it was started. By 1933, construction and linkage of the trail was under way in most areas, but not northern New England. Some thought the trail should end at New Hampshire's Mount Washington because blazing the A.T. through Maine's rugged wilderness would make it difficult to access and maintain. After a two-year study, a proposed route for the trail appeared in a 1933 issue of _In the Maine Woods,_ and Myron Avery began convincing volunteers and the Civilian Conservation Corps to help. They measured the trail, built campsites, and drew maps. However, much of their work was done hastily in an effort to extend the trail through to Katahdin. In August 1937, the final section was completed on the north slope of Spaulding Mountain, but the problem of maintenance would persist. Through the 1940s, hurricane blowdowns and new logging operations caused the trail to fall into disrepair. Many of the trail volunteers were sent off to war, so it stayed in bad shape until the 1950s, when efforts to restore the path began anew.
Earl Shaffer, the first thru-hiker in 1948, experienced much of that difficulty. He wrote that the terrain in spots had been wrecked by a hurricane, with summer growth and brush pushing through fallen trees, and another stretch was "on corduroy," left from winter logging operations. Cross logs were suspended across the trail, on stumps and slash, and the snow had melted, leaving them exposed and rotting. "How hazardous this was can be imagined," he wrote. And here came Emma, six years later, plodding along through stones and stumps, her knee getting worse with each footfall, up 4,250 feet of rock called Sugarloaf, past the ski lift, then down the other side and out onto the highway. There she met Mr. and Mrs. Richard Bell, who were spending a week at a friend's cabin and invited Emma to sit down for some breakfast. Her knee was throbbing and swollen. After breakfast, Richard Bell positioned Emma and his two young daughters by a trail sign and snapped their photograph before Emma cut away.
A fall storm was moving in as Emma hobbled on. She couldn't make it far. Her leg was hurting so badly. She stopped early, at Horns Pond, and ducked into a log shelter built by the Civilian Conservation Corps. It would have to do for the night. She couldn't walk any farther. The next day was the same, only now she was fully limping, trying to keep weight off her knee. And the gray sky had opened, dumping rain on the wilderness, which was followed by a bitterly cold wind. She'd only made it a few miles, but Emma stopped at a shelter on Mount Bigelow to attempt to dry her things and thaw her fingers and toes. She tried to build a small fire near the shelter, but each time she made a little progress the strong gusts of wind blew most of the precious heat away. She tried again and again until she was frustrated. She gave up and was stomping out the few embers when a man walked up behind her. His presence startled her. The man was the forest warden for the region, Mr. Vose, and he'd been looking for Emma. There was an item about her from the United Press in the newspaper:
FARMINGTON, Maine (UP)—A 67-year-old grandmother from Gallipolis, Ohio neared the end of a [2,050] mile hike on the Appalachian Trail today. Mrs. Emma Gatewood, the hiker, is within 110 miles of her destination—Mt. Katahdin, Maine. She expects to reach the mountain in a fortnight. Mrs. Gatewood, a sturdy five feet, four inches, started from Oglethorpe, Ga., on the Appalachian Trail last May 2. Mt. Katahdin is the end of the trail. Mrs. Gatewood carries a light shoulder pack with a raincoat, blanket and enough food to last her between stopovers. She walks only about eight miles a day now because of a lame leg. Why the long walk? Mrs. Gatewood, who has 11 children, 23 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren, put it this way: "After 20 years of hanging diapers and seeing my children grow up and go their own way, I decided to take a walk—one I always wanted to take." The warden invited Emma to his cabin not far away. It was warm inside, and the fire felt good. She was happy to get out of the rain and cold, to have a chance to dry her belongings and give her knee a rest. There was still plenty of daylight left, but the warden advised Emma against going out on the trail again. The rain and cold were too much, and the stretch to the northeast was still damaged from a hurricane. He told her she couldn't get through the blowdown before nightfall.
She took his advice. He left the cabin to finish his shift, and while he was gone, Emma busied herself with chores. She washed the dishes, washed and dried her clothes, and fetched two buckets of spring water from a stream down the mountain a piece. She mopped the cabin floors and made biscuits and popped a skillet of popcorn over the dancing fire. The smell hit the warden when he came in from work. He was surprised and happy to see his place tidy and his supper made. He pulled a spare mattress from under his bed and made a pallet on the floor. The two strangers slept soundly to morning. 15 ALL BY MYSELF SEPTEMBER 12–24, 1955 It was hard to believe she'd come so far. A little more than one hundred miles left to Katahdin. She'd be doing just fine if her knee wasn't slowing her down, but things could be worse. Emma started to climb Mount Bigelow about 8:00 AM, leaving the warden behind, and was approaching the fire tower on a patch of jagged rock when a raging gust of wind ripped over the bald, caught her, and tried to dislodge her from the mountain. She held firm, let the gale pass, and kept climbing.
She reached the stretch through which the hurricane had passed, and the toppled, tangled trees made hiking miserable. She struggled all day, climbing over splintered forest and corrupted stone. She found a used mattress at a shelter near Jerome Brook and made a bed for the night. A heavy frost set in the next day, and she wished she had something heavier to wear. She tried walking faster to keep warm, but the cold persisted. She stopped for breakfast the morning of September 14 at the West Carry Pond sporting camps. The proprietor, Adelaide Storey, gave Emma some snacks for the trail and took a few photographs. By now, Storey was used to ragged hikers schlepping through, as she'd met most of the thru-hikers who had come before and often housed the volunteers who worked on the trail. Emma walked on to the East Carry Pond camps and rented a cabin. Franklin Gaskell ran the camps and his wife was out of town, so Emma cooked a biscuit supper for the man and his son. The next morning, Gaskell knocked on Emma's cabin door and told her she should join them for breakfast. He had a surprise.
She sat down at the table and he scraped several small fried trout onto her plate. The pond was thick with them. Emma had never eaten trout before and she loved the meal, devouring each one. She followed a tote road past Pierce Pond and on a few more miles to the Kennebec River, arriving in the afternoon. There was no bridge across the swift-flowing, rocky stream. A forest warden, Bradford Pease, met her there with a canoe. He handed her a fat life preserver and she climbed aboard, bundled in a head scarf against the cold. Pease paddled Emma across the river to Caratunk, where a small crowd was waiting. Chief Warden Isaac Harris tugged the canoe onto the bank and greeted Emma. A reporter snapped her photograph as she climbed out of the canoe and stepped ashore, clutching her walking stick. She remembered then that she had dropped her raincoat on the far shore, so the warden started back across to fetch it. Emma told the reporter she was determined to finish, but her pace had slowed from twelve miles a day to eight. "I'm having a little difficulty with my knee," she said. "Thought I'd rest overnight."
She learned from the reporter, an older woman herself, that the past few nights, including the night Emma had slept in the open shelter at Jerome Brook, the temperature had fallen well below freezing. Emma wasn't surprised. The nights had been bitterly cold. But walking and climbing in the mornings had thawed her. "It didn't take me long to warm up," she said. Her photograph ran on the AP wire and was reprinted in newspapers across the country with headlines such as HIKING GRANNY REACHES MAINE, HIKING GALLIPOLIS GRANDMA GETS REST NEAR GOAL, and OHIO GRANDMA NEARING END OF HIKE. She walked to where the trail left the small town of Caratunk and then the reporter took her back to a large farmhouse called the Sterling Hotel for the night. Her clothes were wet again, so Emma asked the proprietor if she could dry them by the fire and kitchen stove. Emma made a skirt out of her blanket and spread the clothes out in the heat. The next day was brutal as she approached the 100-Mile Wilderness. The trail was horrible with tangles of briers and swamp grass, made worse by the fact that she could barely see with only one lens in her glasses. She still walked hard and she had put in more than fifteen miles before she decided to quit for the day, but shelter was nowhere to be found. A campsite would have to do. The temperature had started to fall. Emma scrambled around collecting enough firewood to keep a flame burning all night. Her blanket and clothes did little to keep the warmth in or the hard cold out. She slept on the ground by the fire, rotating from side to side to keep warm, her breath rising like smoke. Fear kept her awake—not of bears or moose, but of catching herself on fire.
She rose early and walked ten miles by noon to the village of Blanchard, where an old man sold her breakfast for fifty cents, then she chipped off a few more miles to Monson, the last place to stock up on supplies before the 100-Mile Wilderness. She bought some groceries and tucked in at a motel kept by Sadie Drew in Monson. The walk through the forest was nice the next morning, though all the cabins at Bodfish Farm had been rented. One young couple let Emma stay with them. They served her supper and breakfast and didn't charge her for the night's sleep. On September 19, her good fortune changed. The trail passed through a region of thick timber and several stretches were clogged with dense berry bushes. They snagged her dungarees and there was no clear path through. She could scarcely keep track of the trail, much less blaze her way through the bushes. She climbed five peaks in the Barren Chairback Range, over rocks and around roots and through gullies and past the old stumps of white birches. Darkness had fallen by the time she walked into the Long Pond Camps, exhausted. A man showed Emma to her cabin and served her supper before she took a quick bath and fell asleep.
The tote road that carried her to White Cap Mountain was smooth, the walking easy if a bit chilly. From the top, on a clear day, Katahdin can be seen on the horizon, some seventy miles away. But once she got over the 3,654-foot peak, the hike grew miserable. There had been a forest fire. The trail blazes were few and far between. She had to wade through icy water for a section. There were no shelters in sight, so she walked two miles off the trail and got a nice cabin at the West Branch Pond Camps from Robert Tremblay, who owned the place. He brought her back to the trail the next morning and she again fought through a nightmarish and desolate patch of wilderness before stumbling upon the old shambles of a logging camp, which had been abandoned. Most of the buildings looked like they'd fall down with a decent push. She found the one that seemed the safest—or had a roof, at least. Inside, the floor was lined with long wooden benches, where she made a bed. She fell the next day, coming down a hillside. It was not a fall that stopped her, but a fall bad enough to sprain her ankle, bruise her eye, and break her glasses, leaving her hobbling nearly blind for the last leg of the trail. She limped into Nahmakanta Lake, though, and hoped the dead red fox she found in front of the lean-to wasn't an omen that things would get worse. She got two long sticks and carried the carcass far into the woods. When she returned she cleaned the spot where it had been decomposing before bedding down for the night.
She hiked along the shoreline the next morning and stopped for lunch at the Nahamakanta Lake Camps, then walked blindly the last ten miles to Rainbow Lake, arriving around 4:30 PM. Katahdin jutted from the earth above the tree line on the opposite bank, and the sinking sun lit its peak. As Emma walked into camp, she recognized some of the men she'd met the year before. They were surprised to see her, after the experience last year, but they were ecstatic. They couldn't believe she'd come all the way from Georgia. One of the men washed Emma's clothes for her and she dried them on a line in Cabin 5, the same cabin she'd slept in on the last trip. She washed her long, gray hair and dried it, then sat down to supper of meat and vegetables with the men. They treated her like royalty. Somehow, the place felt like home. P.C. was gone for good, and Emma was changing. Her children noticed that she was happier than they'd ever seen her. She had time to read more, time to garden, time to walk to visit friends, the freedom to travel.
"I am more than glad to be free of it all," she wrote in her diary. "Have been happy ever since." Nelson graduated high school in 1941. The only social activity on Barkers Ridge was at the Baptist church, where they had fire-and-brimstone revivals in the summer. The boys, Nelson and Robert, would go to the revivals to try to convince pretty girls to let the boys walk them home. One night, Robert, in his early twenties, was sitting beside a girl and his whispers got a little loud. A few days later, he and Nelson were on the farm, playing croquet shirtless and barefoot in the side yard, when a sheriff's deputy pulled up. He stepped out of the car and approached the boys and said he had a warrant from Robert's arrest. He said Robert had been disturbing the peace in church. The boys stood there, white-faced, before Robert spoke up. _Well, let me go in the house and put on some clothes,_ he said. The deputy nodded and Robert walked inside. Nelson talked to the deputy a while and collected the croquet set and put it in the garage, which had cracks between the wall slats. On his second trip in, he peered through the slats and saw Robert running down over the hill. He'd climbed out the back window.
Nelson didn't say anything to the deputy. They stood around a few more minutes. _It's taking him an awfully long time to put some clothes on,_ the deputy said. _Go on in there and check and see when he's going to be ready._ Nelson followed his orders. He spent about five minutes inside and came back out. _Well, I went to every room in the house, and I can't find him,_ Nelson said. _Don't know where he is._ Around midnight, Robert came back to the house. _Can I borrow your bike?_ he asked his younger brother. _I'm going to ride it to Monroe's._ He left the bike in Gallipolis, at least thirty miles away. The next thing anybody heard, Robert was a soldier in the US Army. Nelson went to work on a dairy farm in Mechanicsville, Ohio— labor so hard you could've wrung sweat out of his belt. When he turned eighteen, on December 28, 1941, he took a job with the telephone company and worked there a year before he, too, signed up for war. They put him on a train in Dayton, to Cincinnati, on to Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana, where he got shots and a haircut and even pulled KP duty before the sun had set on his first day as a soldier.
Before the war was over, Robert would be shot down over Munich and spend a year and a half in a German prisoner of war camp. People would whisper about how gaunt and pale he was when he came back to Ohio, a hero. Nelson, a paratrooper, would take a bullet to the thigh on Corregidor Island in the Philippines, recover, and get set to jump again when the war was called off. "They were tough, that family," their cousin, Tommy Jones, would say years later. "Every last one of them." As soon as Emma could, she sold the farm on Barkers Ridge and in 1944 moved back to Ohio, to Chesapeake, just across the river from Huntington, West Virginia. Louise went off to Marshall College while Lucy, the youngest, finished high school. Emma enrolled her in business school at Bliss College in Columbus, then bought a house in Rutland, Ohio, north of Gallipolis, on the Appalachian Plateau. With nothing tying her down, Emma began to relocate frequently. She went to Pittsburgh and worked nine weeks, came back to Rutland to rent the house, then went to Dayton to work in a private boarding school for three months. In 1945, she moved back to Rutland and began renovating the home. She changed the cellar stairs, cut a doorway, installed banisters on the front porch, tore down an old fence, chopped down trees, demolished an old barn, and built a rock garden. Between projects she read and wrote poetry about nature, about God, about men, about tugboat landings and swimming holes and naughty birds and her new stage in life.
My home I scrubbed and painted, Until I nearly fainted, Just for the lack of pelf, All by myself. She self-published a collection that she distributed with great humility to friends and members of her family. In 1949, Louise had a baby, Barbara, and needed help, so Emma moved back to Gallipolis. The next year, Emma and Louise bought a house together at 556 Fourth Avenue. They got along well. Emma read the newspaper every day and paid attention to local politics, often opining on the news—with sharp wit—in letters to the editor. On June 12, 1951, she sent this: Dear Editor: I was going to write and get in my three cents worth of opinion about how negligent the school board has been about making more room in our overfull schools, but decided not to disturb them in their lethargy. Instead I will give my version of what goes on with the peas in our gardens after they come up. I only have to say the rabbits ate my peas to get an argument started. Most everyone around here that has tried to raise peas say "the birds ate them off."
My peas have vanished in the past quite a few times. One time when they were being eaten I put a chicken wire fence around the rows, and they were not bothered again. Anyone should know a fence will not keep out the birds. Another time when the peas were three or four inches tall they were eaten off clean, half way of the rows in a day or two. There happened to be a family of rabbits living in my garden at the time. Last year there were two rabbits lived in and around my garden and the peas were eaten. This year our garden is back of the athletic field fence and the holes were stopped to keep out the rabbits, which lived just on the other side. One could see them each morning out getting their breakfast, but the peas were not bothered. Someone will have to show me a bird eating peas before I will believe. There has been robins, starlings, English sparrows and other sparrows, the tanager, blue bird, doves, blackbirds, gold finches, cat birds, yellow hammers, wood thrush, and indigo buntings, and not one of them have ever been seen to peek anything but bugs and worms in the garden.
Rabbits will also cut off the rose bushes as with a knife. I will venture to say that there are more rabbits in this town than in the same area in the country around. I do know that I can tramp the hills over and never see one rabbit, but see them here quite often. Build a good fence and raise peas or get rid of the rabbits and raise them. —Emma Gatewood. Louise got married in 1951, deeding her part of the house to her mother, and left Emma, for the first time in three decades, alone. All of her eleven children were on their own. Emma would bounce around the next few years working menial jobs or caring for ailing relatives, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Owensboro, Kentucky, and Miller, Ohio. But after Louise left, in 1951, Emma rented the house and went to work for five months at the county hospital in Columbus, where she likely first saw the _National Geographic_ story about the Appalachian Trail, the one that promised the long path had been "planned for the enjoyment of anyone in normal good health" and "doesn't demand special skill or training to traverse" and gave the following scant advice to those considering a long hike:
Exercise caution over rough or steep parts. Wear clothing suitable to the latitude, elevation, and time of year. Plan where to pitch your tent, or find other shelter along the way. Carry enough food, or know where meals may be had. For an extended A.T. trip, thorough preparation should be made. The condition of Trail stretches to be traversed should be carefully checked. Like the five reported thru-hikers before her and the thousands who would follow, she hadn't been able to get the trail out of her head. In July 1954, she flew to Maine and started south from the summit of Mount Katahdin and got lost and very nearly couldn't find her way out of the wilderness. _Go home, grandma,_ one of the rescuers had told her. But she was back. The men told Emma to wait at Rainbow Lake so they could summon a warden to meet her at the west branch of the Penobscot River to ferry her across. She waited around until 9:00 AM, then headed east past Little Hurd Pond and Pitman Pond, walking about ten miles before noon. When she got to the river, no one was there to meet her. She climbed atop a large rock above the logging road to sit and eat her lunch.

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