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February 22 - March 16, 2019
She’d never betray the real reason. She’d never show those newspapermen and television cameras her broken teeth or busted ribs, or talk about the town that kept dark secrets, or the night she spent in a jail cell. She’d tell them she was a widow. Yes. She’d tell them she found solace in nature, away from the grit and ash of civilization. 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.
She opened her eyes and there he was, standing erect on her breast, just two strange beings, eye to eye, in the woods.
Her own children had no idea she was here. She wasn’t even sure if all eleven of them knew about the Appalachian Trail, or how the footpath had been calling her, how she’d been captivated by the fact that no woman had yet hiked it alone.
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.”
By the time the article was published in 1949, just one man, a twenty-nine-year-old soldier named Earl V. Shaffer, had officially reported hiking the trail’s entire length in a single, continuous journey.
She closed her door and dropped her bag and walked to the mirror. She barely recognized the woman staring back at her. Broken glasses. A black fly had bit her near the eye and it was bruised. Her sweater was full of holes. Her hair was a mess. Her feet were swollen. She thought she looked like a drunk out of the gutter. A vagabond. A sixty-six-year-old failure. She’d tell no one about this.
This time would be different. She had learned hard lessons.
They allowed her to stay the night at their home and drove her back to the trail the next morning, to the same spot from which she’d left, and sent her packing with a mess of corn pone.
He found her in the dark.
She was not far removed from Levi Trowbridge, who fought in Capt. Thomas Clark’s Derby Company in the Revolutionary War, and with the Green Mountain Boys under General Ethan Allen.
It wasn’t what she had in mind, but she tried hard to make the best of it. They were married three months before he drew blood.
Here walked a new pioneer, her swollen feet inside worn-out tennis shoes, climbing up to Wayah Bald,
she was growing hungry, but her supplies were gone. She ventured off the trail and found a small sassafras tree in the forest. She picked the tender young leaves from the tips of its branches and made a salad. Nearby, she found a bunch of wild strawberries. They were tart, but nice.
just before she reached the top, she slipped on a slick boulder, fell, and broke her walking cane. She picked herself up off the rock and checked to see if everything was in order. It was, and she pressed on.
Their ancestors were French Royalists, and they had been swindled. Five hundred noblemen, artisans, and professionals had bought parcels in Ohio, sight unseen, from a sham company, and they sped west across the Atlantic in January 1790.
Emma Gatewood learned she was pregnant with her first child not long before her new husband struck her for the first time. He smacked her with an open hand, and the sharp sting of his palm on her cheek stunned her, frightened her. She thought of leaving him that day and that night and on into the next, but where would she go?
She was a practical woman, a Roosevelt Republican, and knew how to do things for herself. She had a set of books from 1908 full of home remedies and concoctions that would take paint off the door or cure dandruff or kill ants. She had ripped out the page that explained how to ferment grapes to make wine.
he punched her in the face and head so many times that for two weeks she could barely rest it on a pillow. They named the baby Esther Ann.
So many trees and bushes provided food—hickory nut, beechnut, walnut, honey locust pod, maple syrup, crabapple, mulberry, plum, cherry, huckleberry. Edible plants included dandelions, narrow dock, wild lettuce, white top, clovers, violets, meadow lettuce, poke leaves, and milkweed. And nothing went to waste.
Always, though, just beyond the thin shroud of his respectable public persona, there gurgled a mean streak, and if something set him off, he’d grow wild-eyed and his veins would bulge.
His madness, in the right moment, wasn’t even bound by law. In 1924, a year after Emma delivered their ninth child, P.C. killed a man.
Word was that Johnson’s widow would not sue P.C. because he’d paid the medical bills and funeral expenses.
She sucked on bouillon cubes as she hiked, and found water where she could. She filled up on wild strawberries—whenever she found a patch, she’d drop her sack and stuff it with as many as she could carry.
A heavy fog settled over the Smoky Mountains that evening and a chill set in, so Emma heated smooth stones in the fire and slept atop them to keep her back warm.
She made it into Hot Springs, North Carolina, on May 28, after an arduous uphill climb.
They were no ordinary prisoners of war. The men wore suits and ties and the women were fantastic dressmakers. They set about building a village on the hotel lawn using driftwood and scrap lumber. They built a chapel from flattened Prince Albert Tobacco tins. The townspeople developed friendships with the enemy aliens, and each Sunday afternoon they sat together for a concert from the prisoner orchestra. After the war, the prisoners from what had been the largest internment camp in the United States were transported to Fort Oglethorpe, in Georgia, where Emma had started
Emma sensed that brotherly love. The folks in the area were awfully nice, and just about everybody she bumped into insisted on feeding her and giving her something to drink. One woman gave her a glass of buttermilk and a piece of cake, her first on the trail, and she enjoyed it. She heard the locusts sawing for the first time all year.
It wasn’t rare for her to be gone for long stretches, so if they gave her disappearance a passing thought, it did not dwell in their memories.
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. “My feet are sore,” she would write. “I did not find any water,” she would write. “I kept a fire
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President Franklin D. Roosevelt was already planning ways to absorb millions of soldiers, soon to engage fully in World War II, back into the nation’s economy once the last bullet had been fired. And he saw a national system of highways that connected the country’s major cities and spliced together rural agriculture centers as a possible solution.
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. Aristotle lectured while strolling. Through the centuries, the best thinkers, writers, and poets have preached the virtues of walking. Leonardo da Vinci designed elevated streets
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Charles Dickens captured the ecstasy of near-madness and insomnia in the essay “Night Walks” and once said, “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.”
In 1948, Earl V. Shaffer became the first person to hike its entirety in a single trip, the first thru-hiker, and when he was finished, he wrote: “Already it seemed like a vivid dream, through sunshine, shadow, and rain—Already I knew that many times I would want to be back again—On the cloud-high hills where the whole world lies below and far away—By the wind-worn cairn where admiring eyes first welcome newborn day—To walk once more where the white clouds sail, far from the city clutter—And drink a toast to the Long High Trail in clear, cold mountain water.”
She asked a man there, standing in front of the sixty-four-hundred-acre lake, for drinking water, but he said there was none around. Emma didn’t seem to mind, though. “A very nice looking man he was, too,” she wrote in her notebook when she stopped to drink from a spring.
The trail was lousy with nettles and brush and the hike was miserable, but she finally crossed the state line, into Virginia, and into the little town of Damascus. It was a place that would become known as Trail Town, USA, in part due to its kindness to A.T. hikers, but on that day, when she needed shelter most, she was turned away from a motel.
She washed some of her clothes and that night, celebrating the fact that she crossed another state line, her third so far, she sat down and treated herself to a delicious supper of steak.
The first introduced himself as Preston Leech, a photographer from Roanoke, Virginia, and the second said he was Frank E. Callahan. They were both trail club members who had heard about her journey and spent the afternoon trying to track her down. They were overjoyed to finally find her.
That night, she jotted in her diary. “I finally was found by the newspaper,” she wrote. The next morning, a headline ran in the Roanoke Times. OHIO WOMAN, 67, HIKING 2,050 MILES
“Uphill walking is easier than going down,” she declared.
The trail was designed to have no end, a wild place on which to be comfortably lost for as long as one desired.
The first came in the form of a man trying to shake his demons. Earl Shaffer came home from World War II “confused and depressed,” he wrote. He had lost a close friend in the war, someone with whom he had shared a desire to hike the A.T.
The flowers bloom, the songbirds sing And though it sun or rain I walk the mountain tops with Spring From Georgia north to Maine.
blame, even two years before anyone had heard of a boy named Elvis Presley: broken homes, television crime programs, comic books, tensions over the threat of war. One other motivator was blamed: inadequate recreation.
“I could hardly wait until I got away to burst into laughter at the ridiculous situation I had gotten into,” she wrote. “The looks on those boys’ faces.”
Some passersby mentioned a restaurant, a Howard Johnson’s, in the vicinity of Waynesboro to the north, and she spent much of the day’s hike thinking about hot food.
She told him about the trail magic, and how welcoming some folks had been. “I have found a lot of lovely people who have taken me in for a night’s lodging and food,” she said. “I have also found some who didn’t care to have me around.”
When the interview was over, she bought a raincoat, shoes, socks, and some food and headed off again toward the trail, then toward Sawmill Shelter.
She could hide in the woods. Always. “I’ve always done a lot of walking in the woods,” she’d tell a newspaper reporter years later. “The stillness and quiet of the forests has always seemed so wonderful and I like the peacefulness.”
