Nine flat miles across the delta into Skagit County

Milltown is an unincorporated community in Skagit County, out on the flat ground of the Skagit delta. Henry Landes recorded it in the Washington Geological Survey's 1917 A Geographic Dictionary of Washington in a single line: a town on the G. N. Ry., eight miles south of Mount Vernon, in southwestern Skagit County, elevation four feet. Most of what survives of it now is road names. Milltown Road stems east from Pioneer Highway, the old State Route 530, and becomes Starbird Road where it meets Pacific Highway, the old U.S. 99, beside Interstate 5's Exit 218.

This is the leg where the walk crosses out of Snohomish County and into Skagit. The ground is delta farmland only a few feet above the sea, and it stays that way most of the rest of the distance to Mount Vernon. It is a short leg and a flat one, which is not the same as an easy one: this route has thirty-five walking days inside forty-five, and they are decided by the accumulation rather than by any single day.

There is no institution here to visit, and that makes it a reasonable day to explain what people usually get wrong. The thing she is asking people to join is not a building and not a single national list. Through its Search and Match Service, the World Marrow Donor Association manages an inventory of more than 42 million donors available for transplantation, held across many separate registries. Jada's match was one name in that inventory: a man in Germany whose registration was already on file before anyone in Washington State went looking.