Free Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail by Ben Montgomery Page A

segregation was required in seventeen states at the time of the ruling, and six of those (Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia) were home to the A.T. Four others (Alabama, Delaware, Kentucky, and South Carolina) were close to the trail. In White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, not far from the trail, three hundred white students held a strike when about twenty-five black students tried to attend school in September 1954. That evening, hundreds of white adults met and voted to remove from class any black students who came to school the next day. None did, but the revolt began to spread, to Milford, Delaware; and Baltimore, Maryland; and Washington, DC.
    The other shocking story of the period was the rapid rise in juvenile crime. Headlines in New York screamed about the “Teen-Age Thrill Killers,” a band of four boys from respectable Brooklyn homes who killed a man, beat another up and dumped him in the East River, horsewhipped two girls, and set another man on fire.
    Across the country, killer kids made news. A twelve-year-old basketball player from Detroit killed another after a game. A seventeen-year-old from Toledo raped and killed a girl. A fourteen-year-old babysitter in Des Moines killed an eight-year-old because he wouldn’t stay in bed. The national crime rate for boys and girls under eighteen had jumped 8 percent between 1953 and 1954.
    The spree was cause for great concern, and adults found social forces to 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.

    She left Sunset Field, near Roanoke, Virginia, at 5:30 AM and had a difficult time following the trail. Much of it was overgrown, and the blazes were hard to see. She was surprised when the trail led directly to a large woven-wire fence. Beyond it was a huge metal apparatus she didn’t recognize. The trail marks stopped, and she couldn’t decide where she had gone wrong. She walked along the fence a way and came to a shorter barbed-wire fence, so she climbed through, being careful not to snag her trousers. She came out on a slag road and followed it down to the highway, then found the trail again. She climbed through two more barbed-wire fences, thinking it was odd, but pressing on nonetheless.
    Then she saw them. A dozen young men came marching toward her in a tight group, staring at her as if she were a ghost.
    Where’s the Appalachian Trail?
she called out.
    One of the men—she took him to be an officer—stepped out of the group and approached her.
    You were supposed to take the parkway,
he said.
    Well, what’re those marks for?
she asked.
    That was the old trail,
he said.
    She didn’t know it, but the year before, the Air Defense Command had established a radar station called Bedford AFS atop Apple Orchard Mountain, one cog in a deployment of dozens of mobile radar stations around the perimeter of the country. It was a massive security effort ten years into the Cold War. The squadron stationed atop the mountain was charged with spotting unidentified planes on the radar and guiding interceptor aircraft toward the intruders.
    The men watched the skies, but not so much the ground. Now they surrounded Ms. Emma Gatewood of Gallia County, Ohio, and they stood in shock.
    Thank you,
she said.
    She turned and headed for the gate. The men were silent. As she approached, the guard came out of the shack rubbing his eyes, as if he’d been asleep.
    How’d you get in here?
he drawled in a hoarse voice.
    I crawled through a few barbed-wire fences,
she said.
I’m liable to get arrested and shot, aren’t I?
    The guard grunted and unlocked the gate and let her out. When she was a safe distance away, she couldn’t help but laugh. That night, she hunkered down on the front porch of an empty farmhouse. Cattle were grazing in the field nearby, but there was not a