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October 8 - October 12, 2022
There were a million heavenly things to see and a million spectacular ways to die.
She’d tell them that her father always told her, “Pick up your feet,” and that, through rain and snow, through the valley of the shadow of death, she was following his instruction.
Appalachia, it was called, a term derived from a tribe of Muskhogean Indians called the Appalachee, the “people on the other side.”
They were proud people, most of them, the durable offspring of survivors.
They also knew the songs in the church hymnals without looking, and the difference between predestination and free will, and the recipe for corn likker.
The rise of the car in the 1950s was accompanied by the rise of television. At the beginning of the decade, only 9 percent of American households had a TV set. More than half had one by 1954, and 86 percent would own one by the end of the decade. Americans began to experience life not by the soles of their feet, but by the seat of their pants.
Anthropologists estimate that early man walked twenty miles a day. Mental and physical benefits have been attributed to walking as far back as ancient times. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) described walking as one of the “Medicines of the Will.” Hippocrates, the Greek physician, called walking “man’s best medicine” and prescribed walks to treat emotional problems, hallucinations, and digestive disorders.
“The sum of the whole is this: Walk and be happy; Walk and be healthy.” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of “the great fellowship of the Open Road” and the “brief but priceless meetings which only trampers know.” Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche said, “Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.”
“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.”
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.
I want to see what’s on the other side of the hill, then what’s beyond that, she told a reporter from Ohio.
Maybe she was trying to articulate that exploring the world was a good way to explore her own mind.
She added distance to her total tally until she had walked more than fourteen thousand miles, more than halfway around the earth, putting her in the slim company of astonishing pedestrians.
“Because,” she told a reporter, “I wanted to.”
The Grandma Gatewood Trail has come to be part of the cross-state, twelve-hundred-mile Buckeye Trail, part of the forty-six hundred-mile federal North Country Trail that runs from New York to North Dakota, and part of the American Discovery Trail that covers sixty-eight-hundred miles from Delaware to California.
