[title subtitle=”Review: Marla Cantrell”][/title]
By Ben Montgomery | Pulitzer Prize Finalist | 277 pages |$27
You could credit this entire biography on an article about the Appalachian Trail published by National Geographic in August 1949. Emma Gatewood, a great-grandmother living in Ohio, found the magazine in her doctor’s office, and as she read she was captivated by these words: “Planned for the enjoyment of anyone in normal good health, the A.T. doesn’t demand special skill or training to traverse.”
Emma’s thought was that her health was just fine, although she did have bunions and eyes so bad she was blind without her glasses. She stood five feet two and weighed 150 pounds, every ounce of her weight filled with the kind of stubborn determination that moves mountains. So she began planning for the day she’d walk the Appalachian Trail, all 2,050 miles of it. She started by taking walks, first around the block, and in just a few months she was hiking ten miles a day.
In May of 1955, when Emma was sixty-seven years of age, she told her eleven adult children she was going for a walk. She’d saved two hundred dollars by then, had a pair of Keds tennis shoes and dungarees, and a pack she’d made from a yard of denim. Inside the pack, she carried Vienna Sausages, raisins, peanuts, candy mints, bouillon cubes, powdered milk, Band-Aids, Vicks salve, a bottle of iodine, a flashlight, bobby pins, a coat, drinking water, a Swiss Army knife and a shower curtain to keep the rain off. What she didn’t have was a tent or a sleeping bag. If she needed a soft place to sleep, she thought, she’d empty her bag, fill it with leaves, and lay down her weary head.
Emma started her hike at the southern terminus of the trail, in Georgia. If being alone scared her, she never let on. Ahead of her, she’d face two hurricanes, a rattlesnake strike, a fall that would break her glasses, and a night spent with gangsters from Harlem. But she didn’t know that yet. So she put one foot in front of the other, walking until her legs burned, until she needed to make slits in her tennis shoes to accommodate her bunions that bloomed from her boney feet.
Those she met along the way wanted to know why this great-grandmother was walking the trail. She’d tell them she’d done it on a lark, but there were likely other reasons. She’d survived a lot in her life, including an abusive husband. She’d eventually divorced him, but when the curious asked, she’d tell them she was widowed.
It’s possible that walking the Appalachian Trail healed Emma. Years later, author Cheryl Strayed would say the same thing, after walking the Pacific Crest Trail, and she’d chronicle her experience in her book, Wild. But whatever Emma was seeking when she started out, this one thing is certain: Emma’s future turned into something miraculous on that trip, and she became the first woman to hike the entire trail alone.
It is stunning to imagine this older woman from Ohio, who didn’t even take a map with her, navigating the mountains and valleys, crossing streams that sometimes rose all the way to her chest. Grandma Gatewood’s Walk may just inspire you to take on your own adventure, to believe there’s nothing you can’t overcome, no matter how old you are, no matter what you’ve faced in your life.
