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

by Ben Montgomery

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

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

There were a million heavenly things to see and a million spectacular ways to die. Two people knew Emma Gatewood was here: the cabdriver and her cousin, Myrtle Trowbridge, with whom she had stayed the night before in Atlanta. She had told her children she was going on a walk. That was no lie. She just never finished her sentence, never offered her own offspring the astonishing, impossible particulars.

She read that a hiker in the Great Smoky Mountains had looked down into a deep canyon and had seen a lank man hoeing a corn patch. The steep cliffs made the hollow seem inaccessible, so the hiker shouted, “How’d you get down there?” “Don’t know,” came the reply. “I was born yere.”

Welcome to Rainbow Lake, one of the men said. You’ve been lost. Not lost, Emma said. Just misplaced.

She zigzagged between North Carolina and Tennessee, thirsty, sore, tired, over roads of cut stone and up mountainsides steep and tall, sleeping outdoors more often than in, giving herself to the wilderness, planting a crop of memories, exploring the world and her own mind, writing in her little notebook of the challenges and rewards, the wild dogs that came in the night, the cozy fire that made a campsite more cheerful, the magic of campers who shared their sausage sandwiches across picnic tables.

Popular Mechanics would call the Penn Turnpike “America’s first highway on which full performance of today’s automobiles can be realized.” The big road was born. It’s ironic, perhaps, but the new expressway’s conceptual father was the same man who thought up the Appalachian Trail: Benton MacKaye.

“Of course, people still walk,” wrote a journalist in Saturday Night magazine in 1912. “That is, they shuffle along on their own pins from the door to the street car or taxi-cab…. But real walking … is as extinct as the dodo.” “They say they haven’t time to walk—and wait fifteen minutes for a bus to carry them an eighth of a mile,” wrote Edmund Lester Pearson in 1925. “They pretend that they are rushed, very busy, very energetic; the fact is, they are lazy. A few quaint persons—boys chiefly—ride bicycles.”

Remote for detachment, narrow for chosen company, winding for leisure, lonely for contemplation, the Trail leads not merely north and south but upward to the body, mind and soul of man.

The trail was designed to have no end, a wild place on which to be comfortably lost for as long as one desired. In those early days, nobody fathomed walking the thing from beginning to end in one go. Section hikes, yes. Day hikes, too. But losing yourself for five months, measuring your body against the earth, fingering the edge of mental and physical endurance, wasn’t the point. The trail was to be considered in sections, like a cow is divided into cuts of beef. Even if you sample every slice, to eat the entire beast in a single sitting was not the point. Before 1948, it wasn’t even considered possible.

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.”

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.

Maybe she was trying to articulate that exploring the world was a good way to explore her own mind.

When it was time for her to go, Snow drove her to LaGuardia Airport and put her on a plane for home. She was carrying her walking stick, as always, and as she boarded the plane, the other passengers and crew kept trying to assist her, as if she were crippled.

When a reporter from Baltimore called her a celebrity, she responded: “I wish you people’d stop calling me names.”

A reporter for the Pittsburgh Press asked her about her plans for the future. “That’s a secret,” she said. “But if I go for another hike I’ll let my family know like I did the last time—with postcards.” She told them all the same thing. “Nobody,” she said, “is going to get out of me what’s going through my head on that score.” She wouldn’t say so, but she was already thinking about the trail again.

An old mutt followed her from Tennessee to Virginia and into a store, where she bought new shoes and left her old high tops—and the dog.

I believe Emma Gatewood was honest. I also believe there’s an equal chance that her stock answers were covers. They were honest—and also incomplete—responses to a question she couldn’t bring herself to fully answer, not when she was a “widow.” Not when she had a secret. Not when she had tasted her own blood, felt her ribs crack, and seen the inside of a jail cell. To suggest she was trying to be the first woman means believing that she was walking toward something. I’m not sure that’s wholly true. I’m not sure she was walking toward something so much as walking away.

There’s one response among the dozens that I’ve come to think best answers the question, a declarative sentence in the public record that is equal parts truth and defiance. It’s a statement that betrays a secret at the same time. There’s something both bold and hidden in the response. Something beautiful and independent, mysterious and brave. There is escape between the words. Escape from abuse and oppression. Escape from age and obligation. It ends with a period that might as well be a question mark, four words that launch a thousand ships, and it’s an answer that frustrates and satisfies. “Because,” she told a reporter, “I wanted to.”