Emma “Grandma” Gatewood tied the laces on her thin Keds. She was sixty-seven. Her family thought she was going for a short walk. She was actually beginning a two-thousand-mile journey through the Appalachian Trail.

She carried no tent. She had no survival gear. To the world, she was an old woman whose body was finally failing. We are taught to see our bodies this way. We view them as fixed objects, machines that inevitably rust and break. We hide in stale rooms and breathe shallowly. We wait for them to give out.