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

soul in sight. She pulled out her notebook.
    “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.”

6
OUR FIGHT
    JUNE 23-JULY 5, 1955
    Her feet were a sight.
    Start with the toes, which were chipped and battered and appeared almost as though she had been kicking rocks. The middle three on each foot hooked permanently downward, almost vertical from the second joint to the tip, from being scrunched into too-small shoes for too long a time. Her small toes deviated toward the center, and on the outside of both feet were large bunions.
    The most astonishing thing about her feet, though, were her big toes, which jutted toward the center at a forty-five-degree angle from her instep. Protruding from the spot where the metatarsal meets the phalange on her insteps were bulbous bunions the size of ball bearings.
    Her feet themselves were wide and flat and covered with veins like the lines on a map, and they ran shapelessly into oversized ankles, then up to narrow, battered, hourglass-curved shins and toward grotesque, gibbous knees surrounded by unnatural, tumorous outthrusts.
    Hers were well-worn legs and she hid her feet inside sneakers and her knees inside dungarees, both of which were getting wetter by the minute. She made her way along the rugged trail in a late-June downpour, over the Priest, elevation 4,063 feet, one of the highest gains in Virginia. She tramped down across the foaming cascades of the Tye River, and on to Reeds Gap, where she lost her rain hat. She walked back a piece to find it but had no luck. She was soaked to the bone by the time she found a man milking a cow beside the trail. His name was Campbell and she asked about a place to stay. He invited her back to his house, which was way down over a hill from the trail. The woman of the house, Sis Campbell, was in her eighties, and the house looked much older than her, and its furnishings seemed to have been original. Sis Campbell led Emma upstairs by candlelight, as the old home had no electricity.
    The next morning was beautiful and she walked north through central Virginia. 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 stopped at the first house to ask for directions. The family, Mr. and Mrs. E. B. Ricks, were very nice and invited her in to rest. Their home was lovely. They had a flagstone courtyard and the prettiest view of the valley Emma could imagine. They were taken by her stories and asked Emma to stay for supper. Mrs. Ricks in particular wouldn’t stop with the questions. After Emma went to bed, she phoned the
News Virginian
of Waynesboro.
    The next morning, they drove Emma the few miles into town. She had breakfast at a restaurant, then went to the drugstore for a few items, then headed across the street and waited for another store to open so she could buy a new pair of slacks, a raincoat, and some new shoes. She had just started to shop when a man saw her and hurried toward her, grinning ear to ear.
    I’m from the newspaper,
he said.
    They’d found her again. The reporter had phoned Mrs. Ricks and she told him that Emma was in the store shopping for shoes. Emma didn’t mind so much this time. Word was out, after all. She answered all the man’s questions.
    Emma told him about her pack, how she had made it herself. He held it and figured it weighed about twelve pounds when full. He asked her how she had stayed warm on cold nights with no sleeping bag. She told him about heating flat rocks over a fire and reclining on them for warmth. She told him she couldn’t sleep many nights for fear of bears. She hadn’t seen one yet, but she’d seen plenty of signs they were around. She told him about the rattlesnake and that there weren’t enough shelters along the trail and that she thought she’d finish by late