Plaques With Inspiring Quotes

A large metal plaque affixed to the rock said: GRANDMA GATEWOOD MEMORIAL TRAIL THIS SIX-MILE TRAIL IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF GRANDMA GATEWOOD, A VIBRANT WOMAN, SEASONED HIKER, AND LONG-TIME HOCKING HILLS ENTHUSIAST. THE PATH BEGINS HERE, VISITS CEDAR FALLS, AND TERMINATES AT ASH CAVE. JANUARY 17, 1981

Harvard generally frowned on Aiken’s postwar activities, however, including his close ties with industry, and ultimately the continual struggle for funding drove him to retire from the university at the minimum age in 1961. When he died suddenly at a conference in March 1973 at the age of seventy-three, Aiken left a generous bequest to Harvard. His generosity was not reciprocated. In spring 2000 the new Maxwell Dworkin computer sciences building was ceremonially inaugurated at the northeast corner of Harvard University’s Holmes Field, formerly the site of the Aiken Computation Laboratory. The new building was a gift to the university from Bill Gates and his Microsoft associate and Harvard classmate Steven Ballmer. Instead of continuing to honor the name of Howard Hathaway Aiken, founder of Harvard’s trailblazing computing program, the new center was named for the mothers of the two recent benefactors. A bronze plaque on the wall of the building is all that remains today to remind of Aiken’s original inspiration. Recently a conference room at the computer center was named for Grace Hopper.

I think I know why all these people line up by that big plaque on the boulder every year and funnel—baby step-by-baby step—onto the Grandma Gatewood Trail. To be here is to participate in an experience, her experience. To walk this path that she loved is to embrace her memory, to come as close to her as possible. To see what she saw and step where she stepped and feel some thin connection to a farm woman who decided one day to take a walk, and then kept going, getting faster until the end. I could be imagining all this, but I lost myself a little. In her footsteps, I forgot my troubles. Maybe the fountain of youth wasn’t a fountain at all.