Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (32 page)

At a meeting of the National Campers and Hikers Association, 1965.
Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds

Cincinnati, 1971.
Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds

For her work, Ohio Gov. James Rhodes gave her the State Conservation Award at the Ohio Achievement Day celebration at the fairgrounds in Columbus. She then flew to Fontana Dam, North Carolina, where she was a special guest at Fall Colors Hiking Week.

Even with all the attention and honors, she continued to find peace in nature all by herself. She would stalk the countryside in search of rare flowers or a dogwood in full bloom. “I went to the hills today, looking for wild crabapples,” she wrote to her daughter.
“I found trailing arbutus all over the place, and a deep wooded gorge I would like to explore.”

P. C. Gatewood fell ill in 1968. In his old age, he had been a doting grandfather, and had served as mayor of the tiny village of Crown City for several terms. He is remembered by many as a fair and hardworking man, and a loving grandfather and great-grandfather. His own children had limited contact with him. Several of them confronted him individually about what he had done to their mother, about what they had seen and heard. He claimed to have no memory of it. No one recalls whether P.C. ever mentioned Emma’s notoriety, but they agree he must have known.

Near Fontana Dam, 1970.
Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds

According to his son Nelson, he made one dying request in his final days. He wanted to see Emma. He wanted her to come stand in his doorway, just for a moment.

The woman who had walked more than ten thousand miles since she left him refused to take those steps.

Her family did not attempt to keep tabs on her whereabouts. She’d simply disappear from Gallia County and return home with a new batch of stories.

“Saw an Indian on one of my hikes,” she told a reporter in Huntington, chuckling, in 1972.

Last summer, up back of Rutland. I had climbed the ridge and started down the other side. Just as I placed a limb across the fence, I looked up and saw a man in the woods. He had a gun. I hadn’t lived this long only to end up being shot in the woods, so I said, “Don’t shoot. I’m Grandma Gatewood. I tromp these woods all the time.” I could tell by his features that he was an Indian, at least part, and his expression showed that he had never heard of anyone by the name of Gatewood. Pretty soon another fellow came up. He told me they came from Portsmouth, were hunting grouse, and sure enough, the man with him was part Indian. “He knows more about the woods than anyone I know,” he said. The first man smiled, looked at me and said, “I’ve seen lots of things in the woods but you’re the most unusual sight I’ve ever come across.”

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.

1973

If there was one place Emma loved, it was a deep and breathtaking sandstone gorge in the hills of southeastern Ohio, a place called Old Man’s Cave, which was carved by streams and percolating ground-water. Through the gorge, the stream snakes through a gallery of features, including waterfalls and eddy pools, diving one hundred feet in half a mile. The moist and cool hollow preserves typically northern trees such as the eastern hemlock and Canada yew, which have survived since the glaciers retreated thousands of years ago.

In the winter, the falls freeze over, creating beautiful ice formations.

The gorge is called Old Man’s Cave because it was once home to a recluse named Richard Rowe. Rowe had worked for his father’s trading business on the Ohio River until the early 1800s, when he
took to the woods to live in solitude. There came a time when he disappeared for several years and was presumed dead. But then he returned. He told an acquaintance he had walked to the Ozark Mountains to find his older brother, but learned he was dead. Rowe told his brother’s widow that he had buried a stash of gold in a gorge in Hocking Hills, and that he would fetch it and return to take care of her. Back at his cave, he went out one morning to get a drink of water. He used the butt of his musket to break the ice and it discharged under his chin. Trappers found his body a few days later,
wrapped him in bark and buried him on a sandy ledge at Old Man’s Cave.

“They’re beautiful, those cliffs,” Emma once said. “In fact, I think it’s more interesting than anything I saw on the Appalachian Trail.”

Every January, starting in 1967, she put on her red beret and led a six-mile hike through Hocking Hills, down by Old Man’s Cave. People came from across the state. She made lots of new friends. In 1972, when she was eighty-four, it was her job again to lead, to set the pace, but she was having trouble coming down. Her legs bothered her below the knees, mostly down the back. She had been trying to work the pain away with exercise, but she couldn’t overcome it. “I feel like taking off to the woods,” she’d tell a woman a few months later, “but I don’t know whether I’d get back.” The trail by Old Man’s Cave is steep in spots, and one must climb gnarled tree roots that grow alongside the path. Age was finally wearing her down. She tried to traverse the winter landscape and struggled.

When she could no longer do it safely, several men carried her over the rough spots.

The following year, 1973, sensing it might be her last event, the organizers held the winter hike in her honor. They made her a hostess, and she stood at the trailhead in her signature beret, greeting her old friends. More than twenty-five hundred hikers showed up. At the lunch break, she was presented the Governor’s Community Action Award for her “outstanding contributions to outdoor recreation in Ohio.”

She took a bus trip that spring, with an open-ended eighty-five-dollar ticket, visiting forty-eight states and three Canadian provinces. She met friends or family nearly everywhere she went.
She sent a postcard home in May. Pictured on the front was the Pennsylvania Turnpike, “the World’s Most Scenic Highway.” Her handwriting was shaky. “Am having a nice trip,” she wrote. She stopped in Falls Church, Virginia, to visit Ed Garvey, who penned a popular book,
Appalachian Hiker: Adventure of a Lifetime,
about his thru-hike in 1970. She told him about the night on top of a moss-covered mountain she couldn’t remember the name of, when the stars looked like a million pinpricks of light in a blanket of darkness.

“It was just as clear, and it looked like I could almost reach out and get the stars, and pull them down,” she said. “Oh, I lay there and watched them. It looked so, it was so nice, and it was…. Oh, I enjoyed that night. The little old growth on there was just about so high and just as thick as it could be. There’s a lot of little pines around there, and I got down, I got down to sort of break the wind, you know? I’ll tell you, that was a nice night. I lay there and looked at those stars, and that moon.”

On the last leg of the bus trip, in Florida, she felt air conditioning for the first time, and it was cold and unnatural upon her skin. She felt slightly ill when she got home in late May and blamed it on the artificial cool of the bus. It did not slow her. She prepared the earth for a garden, hoeing and tilling. She planted half runners, potatoes, nasturtiums, corn, and beans. She wrote some letters to distant family. She went to Sunday school and church and played a game of Scrabble with a friend. She cleaned around the flowerbed and swept the walk. She worked in her garden again on Saturday and called her son Nelson on Sunday to say she wasn’t feeling well, that something was wrong—this from a woman who had been sick just once in her life. Nelson dispatched an ambulance and raced to the hospital, flanked by a sympathetic highway patrolman, and found his mother in a coma.

The next morning, June 4, 1973, Nelson’s wife and sister were sitting beside Emma’s bed when she opened her eyes, closed them
again, then hummed a few bars of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord …

The obituaries said she “gained national and world fame” for her hikes. One quoted her daughter Rowena, who told of how Emma had learned of the trail from a magazine article. “She said, ‘If those men can do it, I can do it.’”