Fourteen miles of farm road to a crossroads called Custer

Custer is not a city. It is a census-designated place in northern Whatcom County with a population of 518 at the 2020 census, named in 1886 for Albert W. Custer, an early settler who ran the store and served as the community's first postmaster. The settlement first stood along what are now Valley View and Bay roads and shifted to its present ground between 1890 and 1892, when the Great Northern Railroad arrived. Whatcom County's first creamery opened here in 1892. The town did well in the 1920s as a stop on Highway 99, and the train depot lasted into the 1930s.

The route comes through because this is where fourteen and a half miles of walking ends. There is no hospital here, no research center, nothing that looks like the medical part of this story. That is true of most of the map between Seattle and the border, and most of the map anywhere.

It still counts. NMDP, the donor registry organization that serves patients in the United States, says that about seven in ten people who need a transplant will not have a fully matched donor in their own family. Some of them go on to a half-matched relative or to donated cord blood. Many depend on an unrelated stranger who joined a registry years earlier, in an ordinary place, on an ordinary day, with no idea who they might turn out to match. Jada's donor was a man in Germany who read a newspaper article about bone marrow donation and decided to register. A registry is not a building. It is a very long list of individual people, and where they live has nothing to do with it.