Blanchard, where the flat country ends

Blanchard is an unincorporated community in Skagit County — a scatter of houses and farm road where the delta flats run up against the first hills. There is no downtown to speak of. What there is, is the mountain behind it. The Washington State Department of Natural Resources manages the 4,500-acre Blanchard State Forest here, and describes its Lower Trailhead as the southern entrance to the Chuckanut Mountains. Higher up, the Washington Trails Association describes Oyster Dome as a rocky promontory on the western slope of Blanchard Mountain, with commanding views of the San Juans, the Skagit River flats, the Olympic Mountains and Samish Bay.

The route comes through here because this is where Chuckanut Drive begins to matter. WSDOT records that in 1896, funding from the State of Washington and Skagit County built a road along the shoreline below the present highway — the Old Blanchard Road, the first road connecting Whatcom and Skagit counties. The modern highway came later: convicts began building it in 1910, it opened to automobile traffic in 1916, and by 1926 all but one mile between Oyster Creek and Blanchard had been paved. The segment WSDOT treats as historically significant runs from milepost 9 to milepost 19.92 across Skagit and Whatcom counties, and WSDOT places its south end at the intersection of Legg Road — here, in Blanchard. From here to Bellingham, the walk is on that road.

Nothing about Blanchard has anything to do with transplant medicine, and it would be dishonest to dress it up. It is a place at the end of a thirteen-mile day, with a mountain behind it and a long shoreline road ahead. But the case this walk makes is not made in hospitals. It is made in ordinary places, by people who are not thinking about leukemia at the time. The foundation exists because a man in Germany went to a donor drive that had been organized for somebody else entirely, put his name on a registry, and got on with his life — until a one-month-old in Washington was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and turned out to need exactly him.