photo #9161867

In 1955, a 67-year-old Massachusetts grandmother laced up a pair of Keds sneakers, put on a blue skirt, pulled a floppy hat over her white hair, and walked out her front door to cross the entire United States on foot.Her name was Emma Rowena Gatewood. She had raised 11 children. She had survived 32 years of a violent marriage. She had never camped in her life. She had never hiked a trail.She walked to Maine from Georgia. Then, because she felt like it, she did it again in the other direction. Then she did it a third time. She was the first person — man or woman — to complete the full 2,168-mile Appalachian Trail three times.And the story behind why she started walking is the most extraordinary part of her life.Emma was born in 1887 in Mercerville, Ohio, the fourth of fifteen children in a poor Appalachian farming family. She left school at 15 to work. At 19, she married Perry Clayton Gatewood — a schoolteacher who turned out to be violently abusive almost from the start.For 32 years, Perry beat her. He broke her ribs, her teeth, her nose. He fractured her skull on at least one occasion, leaving her with permanent hearing loss in one ear. He once struck her so hard with a broomstick that she lay unconscious in the yard while their children screamed. He strangled her so forcefully during one attack that she lost consciousness and wet herself on the kitchen floor.She tried to leave him multiple times. In rural 1920s and 30s Ohio, there was effectively nowhere for a mother of eleven children to go. Divorce was socially catastrophic. Battered women had no legal protections. She had no money. She had no independent job. Her parents were dead. She stayed because staying seemed to be the only way to keep her children alive.In 1938, after a particularly severe beating that nearly killed her, Emma was finally granted a divorce by an Ohio court — a rare ruling for the era. She got custody of her younger children. She got nothing else.She survived the next seventeen years by working as a cook, a cleaning woman, a waitress, a housekeeper, and a nurse's aide. She raised her children. She watched them leave home one by one.By 1955, Emma was 67 years old. She had grandchildren. She had no husband. She had a small savings account. Her body had been battered for decades but was remarkably tough — she had always worked physical jobs, and she was small and wiry with surprising stamina.She had been reading National Geographic.One article in particular had caught her attention: a piece about the Appalachian Trail, the 2,168-mile footpath that ran from Georgia to Maine along the spine of the Appalachian Mountains. The article described it as a trail for ambitious young men. It described the terrain as rugged and dangerous. It described the loneliness of the journey.Emma looked at it and thought: that sounds nice.She told her children she was going on a walk. She did not tell them where. She was worried, she later said, that they would try to stop her.She took an army surplus duffel bag. She filled it with Band-Aids, a change of clothes, a shower curtain to use as a rain cover, a small amount of food, a blanket, and not much else. She did not take a tent. She did not take a stove. She did not take a map — she planned to follow the trail blazes painted on trees.She got a bus from Ohio to the southern end of the trail in Georgia. She started walking.She was 67 years old. She was five feet three inches tall. She weighed about 140 pounds. She wore Keds canvas sneakers — which were not hiking shoes of any kind — and replaced them with new pairs as each pair wore through.She slept on the ground, in barns when farmers offered, in cheap motels when she passed through towns, and in one memorable case on the porch of a funeral home during a thunderstorm. She ate bologna sandwiches. She ate wild berries. She ate whatever local hikers and families along the trail offered her — and a surprising number did, because word began to spread along the trail that an elderly woman was hiking it alone.She got lost multiple times. She was caught in snowstorms. She broke her glasses and had to be led through one particularly difficult section of the White Mountains by a kind stranger because she could no longer see the blazes on the trees. She walked through blisters. She walked through rainstorms that soaked her for days at a time. She kept walking.She reached Mount Katahdin, the northern terminus of the trail, on September 25, 1955 — 146 days after she started. At the summit, she sang "America the Beautiful" to herself.She was 67 years old. She had just become the first woman to solo-thru-hike the entire Appalachian Trail.And when reporters asked her why she had done it, she did not give them the heroic answer they wanted. She did not talk about conquering the trail. She did not talk about challenging herself. She did not talk about feminism or age or adventure.She said, simply: "I thought it would be a lark."Newspapers went wild. She became a minor national celebrity. She was invited onto television. She was interviewed by Sports Illustrated. She was called "Grandma Gatewood" by the press — a name she didn't love but didn't object to.And then, two years later, in 1957, she did the whole thing again.And in 1964, at age 76, she did it a third time — this time in sections — becoming the first person, male or female, ever to complete the Appalachian Trail three times.She also walked the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail in 1959, at age 71, timed to the 100th anniversary of Oregon statehood. She was the first woman to do that too.Between her long walks, she became an advocate for trail maintenance. She argued, in a letter-writing campaign that lasted years, that the Appalachian Trail was poorly marked, dangerously maintained, and needed serious government investment. Her advocacy — combined with her celebrity — helped push Congress toward eventually passing the National Trails System Act of 1968, which gave the AT federal protection.Today, about 3,000 people per year attempt to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. Roughly 25 percent finish. Most are in their twenties and thirties. Most use modern lightweight gear costing thousands of dollars.Emma Gatewood did it in Keds.She died in 1973 at the age of 85. She had outlived her abusive husband by twenty years. She had walked more than 14,000 miles in her lifetime after she turned 67. She had helped create the modern American long-distance hiking movement. She had proved, without ever saying so explicitly, that the life a woman can build for herself after surviving violence can be larger than anything she imagined while the violence was happening.When asked once, late in life, what had made her start walking in the first place, she gave a different answer than the "lark" she had given the press.She said: "I decided to take a walk."She paused."I walked and I kept walking. And I realized after a while that I wasn't going back."