Episode 225: Emma and the Trail

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Sutter Health.

Cancer diagnosis can be scary, which is why Sutter's compassionate team of oncologists, surgeons, and nurses work together as one dedicated team, providing personalized care for every patient.

It's a whole cancer team on your team.

Learn more at Sutterhealth.org.

This episode of the Memory Palace is brought to you by our friends at Quince.

Cooler temperatures are on the way, and as always, Quince is where I am turning for fall staples that actually last from cashmere to denim to boots.

The quality holds up and the price still blows me away.

And the holding up to me, that is really the thing.

Last year I got one of their super soft 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters.

This beautiful and classic brown.

60 bucks, though it looked like a proverbial million.

And I know that that sweater is just waiting for me, waiting for those cooler temperatures.

And when I take it out of the drawer, it is still going to look great.

It is still going to feel great.

It's still going to be in fashion because Quince specializes in true classic staples.

If you want denim that's durable, leather jackets with that clean classic look, you don't want the crazy markups that other retailers are trying to foist on you.

And you want to know that that classic look, it's going to be in fashion for a long time to come.

What you're going to want to wear forever is still going to be wearable for a long time to come.

Look no further than Quince.

Keep it classic and cool this fall with long-lasting staples from Quince.

Go to quince.com slash memory for free shipping on your order in 365-day returns.

That's q-u-in-ce-e.com slash memory.

Free shipping in 365-day returns, quince.com slash memory.

Hey, before we get started today, I want to let folks know

that I'm feeling extraordinarily lucky in these last days.

I live in Los Angeles.

Our house is at the foot of Griffith Park, which is a glorious place.

Just like a miracle of a thing and a gift to all of us who live in this beautiful, strange city.

Rarely has the phrase, there but for the grace of God go I,

resonated more than it has in these last several days.

It is honestly shocking that some stray ember blown from the two major fires that are still going on in our area a week later

didn't land in the park or on our neighbor's roof,

you know, blown on the 100-mile-an-hour winds that blew for like 24 hours, as so many embers did in so many neighborhoods all around us.

Friends from other places, you know, who don't live in Los Angeles have written to ask if we are okay.

And this is a phenomenon that Angelinos know well.

There will be a fire or an earthquake or some sort of unrest, and a relative will call and ask if you're all right.

And you will shrug and say, yeah, this city is huge.

That happened miles and miles away.

We're totally fine.

This time,

no one here is fine.

We know a small handful of people who live in the Palisades.

Each one of them has lost their homes.

And every day we are finding out about people we know in Altadena who no longer have a place to live or to work.

If you, you know, living somewhere else are thinking, boy, this has looked terrible, I can assure you that it is.

But we are safe, and the sky for the moment is clear.

But our friends and our neighbors and our city suffers, and no one knows what will come next.

There is one thing that people who don't live here, who see Los Angeles from afar, never seem to understand.

And I know I was in the same boat before I moved here.

It's that this place, for as spread out as it is, and as diverse as it is in every way, and as different as its various neighborhoods are, and as crazy as its traffic is, and all the things that you think about Los Angeles as a non-Angelino that are in fact true about Los Angeles, despite all of that, it feels remarkably small and interconnected.

It is an incredible city and community, and I love it and its people so much.

If you are one of those people who are feeling helpless and just wanting to do something, I mean, man, just go pick a GoFundMe.

Just look through the hundreds, probably thousands of GoFundMes,

just in Altadena alone, and find someone whose story or family story touches you.

I guarantee you it will not take long to be touched.

And help those people out a little.

I guess that's it.

I just want to leave you with one more thing before I get to this new story.

A friend lost her house and she posted this to Instagram, this message, and I just wanted to read it to you now so that maybe when you read about Los Angeles and these fires, you might know that there are 10,000 other stories just like Melissa's.

She writes, thank you 16945 Sunset Boulevard.

for 26 amazing years.

You were my love-at-first sight dream house that we bought right after we got married in 1999.

Five of my children were born into this house.

You safely helped me raise my five children who made incredible friends in our community.

We walked to and from Palisades Montessori, Marquez Elementary, and then later Pali High School.

You hosted tons of sleepovers, play dates, Girl Scout gatherings for two local troops, holidays, break-the-fast parties, bot mitzvahs, birthday parties, homecoming parties, shivas for my dearly departed parents.

Housed this during the the pandemic in online schools, watch five kids learn to crawl and then walk and then run.

You bravely supported our tree house.

You welcomed five different dogs, held us through sickness and so much laughter and some heartache, welcomed friends and strangers alike, and filled our lives with magic.

We will never forget you or all of the beautiful memories you held inside your walls.

We are forever grateful to you and will miss you like a missing limb.

Your loss is truly a death in each of us and I'm not sure how we will ever pick up the pieces now that you are gone.

RIP Our Magical Home.

This is the Memory Palace.

I'm Nate Tamayo.

She wouldn't put her arms around his waist.

Not for a long time.

Part of it was propriety.

Everyone saw them riding around town, she on the back of his horse.

His horse.

Him, the most eligible bachelor in town.

The college graduate, that rarest of things then at the turn of the 20th century there in rural Ohio.

The beloved teacher, and tall and thin and fit and handsome.

It was no wonder on that first night, when Emma was walking back from church and Perry Gatewood rode up to her on his horse and offered her a ride back home.

that her cousin Carrie encouraged her to go.

If P.C.

Gatewood picks you of all girls to offer a ride home on the back of his horse, you don't say no.

So part of it was propriety.

The rides, that first night and in the next weeks, were the talk of the town.

She didn't want to be seen with her arms around his waist, though it certainly seemed safer than trying as she did to hold on with her legs around the flanks of the horse and with her fingertips around the edge of the saddle.

She didn't want people to talk, but of course they would talk.

She was 19, he was 26, and he was the most eligible bachelor.

He was handsome and intelligent and more worldly than any man she'd ever met.

He loved books.

She loved books.

Loved stories of travel and adventure.

Loved to escape into them and be free for a while of the drudgery of her father's farm.

And she would let her mind wander toward possible futures, possible places her life might be taking her, now that she was riding on the back of P.C.

Gatewood's horse.

But.

It wasn't just propriety.

There was something about him.

He made her uncomfortable.

And she would wish for the rest of her life that she had never put her arms around his waist.

And never said yes when he asked her to marry her.

He made her uncomfortable.

But he was so insistent.

And she was 19.

It was 1907.

And so she married him.

Three months later, he beat her for the first time, and he did not stop for years.

They had 11 children.

She loved them, but she felt more trapped with each birth.

Her husband's cruelty knew few bounds.

Her accounts of the many years they were married are horrifying.

She was raped, she was beaten, broken teeth, broken ribs, black eyes, relentless fear, and regret and shame.

Her children were terrified and traumatized.

Their father's violence was mostly directed at their mother, but one day P.C.

Gatewood got into an argument with a man in the street which came to blows, and he struck him with the butt of his rifle and killed him.

And Gatewood was convicted of manslaughter.

But the judge decided he shouldn't go to jail because he had a wife and children at home.

And in doing so, sentenced his family to their own continued imprisonment.

Went like that for decades.

And I don't want to keep going and keep listing acts of violence, physical and sexual, that Emma Gatewood suffered at the hands of her husband.

But I also don't want that phrase to just slide away.

The phrase is a thing we say, a way to get more quickly from one place to another in a story.

But I am saying to you, I want you to understand that it went like that for decades.

It ended twice.

First, one day when he beat her beyond recognition and her son Nelson, then 15, came home and saw it and dragged his father off his mother and told her to run, and she did.

And his father never beat her again.

The second ending came in a courtroom when a judge said that Emma Gatewood had sufficient cause to divorce her husband after 34 years.

I do not know whether the judge said that divorcing him was a remarkably brave thing for Emma Gatewood to do, but it was.

Her children would tell a writer that it transformed her.

In the years immediately following her divorce, they said she was happier than they'd ever seen her.

She visited friends, she spent time in the garden.

She went to visit her kids, the ones who were grown and had fled the family the moment they could, but who were thrilled to have their mother come and stay.

Her youngest were teenagers and nearly on their own too.

And she would write in her diary about the divorce, I am more than glad to be free of it all.

Have been happy ever since.

And I will tell you what she did when she was free.

One day Emma Gatewood was at the doctor's office.

It was 1950.

Her 11 kids were all grown.

Sons had survived the war.

She had been divorced for nine years.

She was 63 years old.

There was a National Geographic that had been sitting on an end table or in a magazine rack in the waiting room since the summer before.

She flipped through it, and she found an article about the Appalachian Trail, a big spread titled, Skyline Trail from Maine to Georgia, about the longest continuous hiking path in the world.

How it had been plotted out in the 20s and completed in the 30s.

How a handful of men, one before the war and a few in the years after, had hiked it all, including one who had recently, in 1948, become the first to traverse its full 2,200 miles up the east coast of the United States in one go.

A National Geographic's reporter and a photographer caught up with people hiking portions of the trail, fit young men clambering across rocky terrain, took pictures of two silhouetted figures looking out from a bluff across a majestic valley in Tennessee, and a group of young New Englanders, teenagers or co-eds in flannel over over white t-shirts or tied around waists, staring out at some expanse in seeming awe from atop boulders.

A girl with wind-tossed hair, jeans rolled up mid-calf above her bobby socks, the quintessence of mid-century vitality.

Emma Gatewood wanted to see the trail for herself.

Didn't tell anyone about it.

But she couldn't forget about it either.

It just looked so beautiful.

Think of it.

To see the country on foot.

Everyone in the pictures looked so happy and free, and she was starting to relate to people who looked happy and free.

And the article talked about how well-maintained the trail was.

How people would go out to hike a section of the trail as a bit of a lark.

Walk from little community to little community.

Ones that had been there forever, and others that had popped up along the route to serve the people who had lately been coming in greater numbers to walk it for a bit.

She could see herself there.

She started to walk around the neighborhood.

A few blocks at first, then more, just enough to tire herself out.

And still in her early 60s, she was still at the point in her life when exercise worked the way it was supposed to.

You do a little bit every day, and then a bit more, and you get stronger.

You feel better.

Soon she was up to 10 miles a day.

She felt great.

And so she hiked the Appalachian Trail.

I see no reason to make you think otherwise.

To keep you in suspense for the sake of drama, though there was plenty of it on her hike.

She didn't make it the first time.

She started in Maine, and not too far in she stumbled and hurt her ankle.

And that hurt ankle?

Let's just say a hurt ankle was nothing to Emma Gatewood at that point in her life.

It wouldn't have stopped her.

But at one point she sat down to rest and put down her glasses on the ground beside her there among the fallen pine needles.

And then she couldn't see where she put them because she didn't have her glasses on, and then she stepped on them, and that was that.

She didn't tell anyone back home when she finally made it back.

Didn't tell anyone that she'd failed.

Because she didn't want them to tell her not to try again.

She hadn't actually told anyone she was even going to try in the first place.

So she just slipped away next spring.

Stayed with a cousin in Georgia, swore that cousin to secrecy.

And she started walking.

Again, there was drama.

How could there not be?

It is 2,200 miles.

She was a 60-something woman hiking through the woods in the early 1950s all alone.

And she was quickly discovering that the article that had inspired her hike had elided many of its difficulties, had said explicitly, and she didn't forget this, she quoted it again and again, sometimes surely like a curse as she cut her knees climbing some massive hill that she didn't know was coming or scratched up her arms pushing her way through branches on one of the many stretches of this then overgrown trail that was often barely a trail.

The article had said, planned for the enjoyment of anyone in good health, the Appalachian Trail doesn't demand demand special skill or training to traverse.

And she believed it.

And so she hiked in canvas sneakers, a pair of white keds.

She brought a single sack that she'd made out of denim.

And she stuffed it with supplies, a first aid kit, a bunch of cans of tin sausage, a gingham dress in case she needed to wear something nice for some reason, a shower curtain for shelter.

It was incredibly difficult.

I could weave drama out of any of her encounters with wild animals, or with wild men who lived off the grid, or with others sure she was a spy for the federal government sent out to scout their property so Uncle Sam could seize their land or tax their whiskey.

Or with the men who would help her out, maybe give her a porch to sleep on, but who then expected her to cook and to clean for them.

And instead she chose to risk another night in the wilderness.

Rather than spend another day of her life cooking and cleaning for some man.

I could have drawn out the suspense, but

why should I make you fear for her

anymore?

When we could spend the rest of the story, this time we have left to spend together with Emma Gatewood,

thinking about this time in her life.

When she is 67 years old, becoming the first woman to hike the Appalachian Trail, and becoming a celebrity.

Because a woman in her 60s in the 1950s who is out hiking the Appalachian Trail all alone, trying to keep it secret from her family, so no one says, hey Ma, hey grandma, don't do that.

It would have been impossible for her not to be noticed.

Not to have the people she encountered on the way wanting to tell other people that they just met this grandmother, a great-grandmother, in the middle of the great Smoky Mountains who was on her way to Maine.

Soon papers were sending reporters ahead to meet her out on the trail.

They'd just wait there in the woods.

Surely one of their better assignments.

Dappled light through the leaves.

Deadlines be damned.

Nothing to do but just sit and wait in the breeze.

Eventually, a reporter for a new magazine called Sports Illustrated, a woman named Mary Snow, caught up with her and kept catching up with her, trailing her along the trail, and would write a feature story that would capture the imagination of much of the country and of TV producers who sent cameras to her house or invited her to appear on their news program or their game show.

She was even called to Capitol Hill.

to talk about the gap between the promise of the Appalachian Trail, a federal project, and the cleared paths and signage and managed wilderness that the government had been assured a hiker would find, and that Emma Gatewood had read about in National Geographic one day in the doctor's office.

Grandma Gatewood, as she was dubbed in the press and then known from then on, is the reason that the Appalachian Trail became the Appalachian Trail.

Not just in the public's imagination, but as a matter of public policy, as she convinced the government to make sure that it lived up to the promise of the Trail's founding vision.

She didn't tell reporters, didn't tell Congress surely, about her life before.

The life that led her to the trail.

She would tell them about the doctor's office and the magazine article, and

the way that it captured her imagination, the freedom it represented, out there in the wide, wide open, just walking.

She'd toss out familiar aphorisms about putting one foot in front of the other or about picking a goal, however arbitrary, and just sticking to it.

About how there was adventure just beyond your door if you were brave enough to just step outside.

She didn't talk about just how brave one sometimes need to be to step outside.

Changed one's life.

Didn't say what freedom meant to her.

Or the solitude of nature.

Or the wide, wide open.

She didn't show her teeth when they'd take her picture, the newspapers.

The reporter sometimes noted that, chalked it up to a Midwestern hard-scrabble stoicism.

Didn't know that she didn't want them to notice that so many of her teeth had been replaced or repaired.

She told people she was a widow, though she was not.

Emma Gatewood kept walking.

She would hike the trail three times.

She became a beloved, if minor, cultural figure for a while there.

She would lead massive hikes, organize whole groups who were delighted to join Grandma Gatewood on some trail, who were inspired by her tale, what they knew of it.

She walked well into her 80s.

If you read about her in the hiking media, in the many histories of the pastime as it has developed in the past decades, in the websites websites and journals and publishing arms dedicated to spreading its particular gospel.

She is often referred to as a pioneer in a subset of the sport called ultra-light hiking, which is one of those niche neologisms that means little to anyone beyond those in a small community to whom it means everything.

It seems comically inadequate as a descriptor for Emma Gatewood.

Toward the end of her life, she would die in 1973 at the age of 85, she spent most of her time, 10 hours a day, often more, clearing and marking a hiking trail near her home in Ohio.

So it would be there for anyone who needed to get outside, whatever their reasons.

And the Gatewood kept walking.

This episode of The Memory Palace was written and produced by me, Nate DeMayo, in January of 2025.

The show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw.

It is a proud proud member of Radiotopia, a network of listener-supported, artist-owned, independent podcasts from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company.

Thank you to everyone who donated to our recent fundraiser.

If you did not and don't want to miss out on the particular pleasure of knowing that you are supporting independent media,

don't miss out.

You can always make a donation at radiotopia.fm slash donate.

I also want to thank all the folks who have bought the Memory Pals book or the audiobook or given it as a gift.

Thanks to you, this book is doing quite well.

It is not some smash hit, but it is chugging along, which is a rare thing, especially among non-fiction books, and readers are finding it.

And I mean, that means the world to me.

And also, as the proprietor of the Memory Palace, I was thinking about this the other day, a modest, sustainable success,

a beloved, almost cult object.

I mean, that feels comfortable.

So this is going great.

So thank you.

And let's keep this thing going, please.

It still makes a great gift.

It still makes a nice companion on your next vacation.

And if you ever want to drop me a line, you can do so at nate at thememorypalace.us.

You can follow me on Twitter and Facebook at TheMemory Palace.

On Instagram and Substack at Thememory Palace Podcast.

And on Blue Sky at NateDeMayo.

All right, I will be back with a new story in a couple weeks.

Thank you as always for listening and let's look out for each other out there, okay?

Radiotopia

from Prx