Brinnon, where two rivers come down to the canal

Brinnon is a census-designated place in Jefferson County, on the west side of Hood Canal at the eastern edge of Olympic National Forest, with 907 residents at the 2020 census. Two rivers define it: the Dosewallips crosses the north-central part of the CDP and enters Hood Canal just north of the settlement, and the Duckabush crosses the south-central part and enters the canal at Duckabush village. The name belongs to Ewell P. Brinnon, a settler who took a donation land claim at the mouth of the Duckabush in the late 1850s; Brinnon itself was established in 1891, when the post office began operations.

Dosewallips State Park sits on Highway 101 at the edge of town with five miles of shoreline on Hood Canal. Washington State Parks tells campers there that they may share space with the local elk herds that wander through camp, and asks them to stay back 100 feet and never offer food. A few miles north, at Jackson Cove, Camp Parsons dates its first Scouts to July 7, 1919, and by its own account is one of the oldest Boy Scout camps in the U.S. That is the character of this whole leg: two lanes of asphalt, deep water on one side, national forest on the other, and not much room in between.

Hood Canal is not a canal but a fjord. The USGS measures it at roughly 110 kilometers long, 175 meters deep, and only 2 to 4 kilometers wide. Walking its shore makes the arithmetic of rural medicine plain. Nobody receives a stem cell transplant in Brinnon; that work happens at specialist centers. The method itself was worked out in Seattle, where E. Donnall Thomas came to the University of Washington School of Medicine in 1963 as the first head of its Division of Oncology and joined Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in 1974. But the other half of the equation travels well. Torsten Huber had joined a donor registry in Germany before Jada Bascom's family ever needed one, and whether he matched her was a question about tissue type, not about geography.