Grandma Gatewood's Walk

The subtitle of this book by Ben Montgomery is "The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Trail."  I'm not sure I would characterize it as "saving" the trail, but the extraordinary story of her hiking the trail when it was still more an idea than a fully realized trail did bring a lot of nationwide attention to the trail and what it needed to improve. She was 67 years old when she decided to do this, having read about it in a National Geographic article. The year was 1955 and Mrs Gatewood had had anything but an easy life, married for years to a physically abusive man and with many children to care for with almost no money. But the husband is out of her life and the children are grown and she wants to do something for herself. She sews herself a denim sack to carry her belongings and wearing her Keds shoes, she hitchhikes, flies, buses and takes a taxi  to the start of the trail near Mt. Oglethorpe, Georgia, 500 miles from her home in Ohio. 

No backpack, no hiking shoes (she went through 5 pairs of Keds shoes), no tent, no hiking sticks. When she ran out of food she would forage in the woods, or stop at people's houses to ask for food or walk several miles into the nearest town and buy a meal. People were not uniformly kind to her--some were discouraging or even threatening--but enough were for her to get where she was going and make a lot of friends and create a real stir of interest along the way. She encountered bears and snakes and missing trail markers and dilapadated shelters and a group of young men from Harlem. Her children, when they found out through the occasional postcard from her or even from an article in the newspaper, were not surprised at what she had undertaken. She became the first woman to walk the trail from one end to the other. While this is a remarkable feat for a a grandma with a bad knee, it was even more remarkable that she did it twice more (once as a through hike and the third time completing the trail in sections). She also helped establish trails for hiking in her home state in Ohio. In 1959, at age 71, she completed walking the original Oregon Trail, another trek of 2,000 miles, adding only an umbrella to her meager baggage to keep the sun off. It was the year following the state's centennial and she was wildly celebrated and given a key to the city of Portland. So, while I am not sure she saved the Appalachian Trail, I would certainly agree that this is an inspiring story.

Kirkus called the tale "a quiet delight of a book."

One Step Too Far

This is the 3rd book I have read by Lisa Gardner and the 2nd of hers (Before She Disappeared) featuring  this protagonist, Frankie Elkin.  Frankie is a recovering alcoholic who has left behind too many people she loved and who have loved her. She takes on the hardest of missing persons cold cases, totally of her own volition and without getting paid. Frankie describes herself as an "average, middle-aged white woman, short on belongings, long on regret." She is on her way to search for a missing boy when she reads about a man who went missing 5 years ago in the wilds of Wyoming's Shosone National Forest. Nobody is particularly happy or welcoming when she shows up in town and volunteers to help the annual search party organized by the missing man's father. But one member of the group, who is an active member of an online chat room for missing persons, vouches for Frankie's bona fides and, when another member of the group goes into the DT's, Frankie is in. The search this year will focus on the one area near where the man was camped that has yet to be searched because of the difficult terrain to reach it. But things start to go wrong from the very beginning. Their food bags, hanging in the trees, are slashed and a significant portion of their supplies go missing. A member of their group is injured when he is hit in the head, ostensibly by a falling rock. The secrets from the night of the disappearance begin to emerge. It turns out that several other hikers have gone missing over the last few years in this same area. But the source of the problem comes as a total surprise, at least to me. As usual, Gardners tight plotting, rich settings and well-developed characters pulled me in and kept me reading late into the evening.

I agree with Publishers Weekly that I hope we get to see more of Frankie Elkin. Kirkus' review concludes, "Terrifying, primal, and very, very tense. Read it with your heart in your throat—but read it."

Wild

Cheryl Strayed is coming to Bend as part of the "Author, Author!" series put on by Deschutes County Public Library. So I vowed to read the book before she came. This is one of those amazing memoirs that will leave you bowled over by her incredible determination, but also slightly uncomfortable for all the personal revelations. It's a little like seeing someone without their clothes on to have their emotions and most intimate behaviors laid out before you. In this combination of feelings, I am reminded of the memoir by Storm Large, Crazy Enough. Cheryl loses her mother from cancer when the woman is in her early forties and it just tears her and her family apart. Her father was long gone, but her step-father immediately got involved with another woman, and her brother and sister just withdrew. She had no real home, no real family and she subsequently embarked on a course of self-destruction that shattered her marriage as well.
She decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) — by herself — to "find herself" or who she wants to be. She is ill-prepared physically, having never backpacked in her life, and starts off with a pack that she cannot physically lift off the floor, eventually nicknamed the Monster. Even though other hikers eventually help her lighten the load by shedding non-essentials, it remains bigger than packs carried by others because she is alone and must carry everything, instead of sharing--her own tent, her own stove, etc. She starts out with hiking boots a size too small, and though they are replaced with larger ones halfway through the 1,200 mile trip, her feet never recover the entire time, and she loses 6 of her toenails and walks with constant blisters and open sores on her feet. She has almost no money, encounters rattlesnake, bears, mountain lion tracks, unpassable stretches of snow and ice, and at least one pair of hunters with bad intentions. Nevertheless she also finds  good camaraderie among the other PCT hikers she encounters and eventually reaches her goal. It is a moving account and you have to admire — and occasionally shake your head at — her sheer stubbornness. It is well written, and her connection to nature shines through.