The largest city in Snohomish County, twenty-five miles north of Seattle

Everett is the largest city in Snohomish County, with more than 110,000 residents, nestled between Port Gardner Bay and the Snohomish River. It was incorporated in 1893 and is the seat of Snohomish County. The day ends at Everett Station on Smith Avenue, the city's multimodal hub, where Amtrak Cascades, Sounder's N Line and regional, county and city bus services all meet.

Everett describes itself as twenty-five miles north of Seattle. That is a short drive and a long walk, and it is the entire distance between this city and the campus where Thomas's team did their work. Distance was never the hard part of this problem.

The hard part sits upstream of any hospital. For a patient who needs marrow from outside their own family, what decides whether a transplant is possible at all is whether a matching donor has already joined a registry somewhere in the world — a decision a stranger made in advance, for no particular reason, before anyone knew the patient's name. That is not something a hospital can arrange, and it is not something a foundation can manufacture. It only happens when people choose to be findable.

So the walk stops here. Everett is where the route's first Bone Marrow Awareness Day falls — a full day, tomorrow, with no miles in it.