Lilliwaup: a cove, a creek, and a name that means inlet

Lilliwaup is a small unincorporated community on the west shore of Hood Canal, at the mouth of Lilliwaup Creek in Mason County. US Route 101 passes through it. The name comes from the Twana word slelawap, meaning cove or inlet. The USGS Geographic Names Information System lists it as a populated place in Mason County at about 47.463 degrees north, 123.114 degrees west.

It has been small for a long time, though briefly it looked like it might not stay that way. The town was platted in 1890 — the same year Joseph O'Neil's Olympic Exploring Expedition left Lilliwaup, in June, heading west to the North Fork Skokomish River and Lake Cushman. A short-lived boom followed: around 30 families had moved in by that September, along with several businesses. The townsite company went bankrupt a short time later and most of the people moved away. What is left is a scatter of buildings along the water and the highway running through the middle of them.

There is a version of this walk's argument that only really works in a place this small. A donor registry is useful in proportion to its size and its reach. NMDP says doctors look at up to 12 different markers on your DNA when matching a donor to a patient, and usually want to match eight to ten of those 12. Those markers are inherited from your biological parents, half from your mother and half from your father — which is why the pool a patient has to search through is far larger than any one town could supply. A cheek swab mailed in from Hood Canal enters that pool on exactly the same terms as one mailed from a city. The database does not know where it came from.