Kamilche: where US 101 meets State Route 108

Kamilche is an unincorporated community in Mason County, at the crossroads of U.S. Route 101 and State Route 108, about fifty feet above sea level, at the edge of Little Skookum Inlet — a finger waterway off Puget Sound. Shelton is about six miles behind; Olympia is about eleven miles ahead.

Little Skookum is narrow, shallow and heavily worked. Its tidelands are commercially farmed for shellfish — clams and oysters cultivated on privately held tideland between the high and low water marks, under state aquatic permits. On a day like this the tide is not scenery. It is a workplace, and the walking is quiet enough to notice that.

There is a reason a stop this small belongs on the route. Registries are searched across borders, not within counties. The global database maintained by the World Marrow Donor Association holds more than forty million donors and cord blood units, listed by registries in more than fifty countries and searched together. Someone who joins here is listed in that same internationally searchable system as someone who joins in Seattle, or Vancouver, or in Germany, where Jada Bascom's donor joined a registry years before she needed him. Where a person signs up does not limit which patients they can be found for.