Eleven miles to a single traffic light

Carlsborg is a census-designated place in the Sequim-Dungeness Valley with a population of 1,100 at the 2020 census. US 101 runs through its southern edge; Sequim is about three miles east and Port Angeles about thirteen miles west. C.J. Erickson founded it in 1915 and named it after Karlsborg, his home town in Sweden, and the sawmill that gave it a reason to exist ran until 1968. What it is best known for now is having three gas stations at the only traffic light on Highway 101 between Port Angeles and Sequim. That is genuinely the whole of it, and there is no reason to dress it up. Small towns on this route are not metaphors; they are places where a person can refill a bottle and sit down.

The reason this leg belongs in a walk about marrow is three miles further on. In Sequim, the Olympic Medical Cancer Center provides medical oncology and radiation oncology for this end of the peninsula, so a diagnosis here does not automatically mean packing a bag for Seattle. A blood stem cell transplant is different. That happens at a specialist transplant centre — the kind of place where the field was built, like Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, where in 1979 a team performed the first successful bone marrow transplant from an unrelated donor for a patient with leukemia. Rural blood cancer has a geography to it: the diagnosis is local, the transplant is somewhere else.

The thing a passer-by can actually do here takes about four minutes and does not happen at a walk stop at all. In the United States the registry is run by NMDP: you order a free swab kit, swab your cheek, and send it back in a prepaid envelope. The Jada Bascom Foundation does not run a registry, does not mail kits, does not type anyone's HLA and does not decide who is eligible. Its entire job on this road is to tell you the registry exists, be straight with you about what joining means, and point you to it.