Where Highway 101 leaves the water

South of Lilliwaup the highway runs on through Hoodsport and Potlatch, still tight against the water. Potlatch State Park, at 21020 N US Highway 101, has a 5,700-foot shoreline on Hood Canal; Washington State Parks lists 38 standard campsites and 35 partial-hookup sites, mooring buoys and dock moorage, picnic shelters, an amphitheater and hiking trails. Just past it, the shoreline the route has followed for weeks finally gives out. The canal swings away to the northeast and the road turns inland.

The Skokomish River flows from Olympic National Park, through Olympic National Forest, and past miles of agricultural landscape before it meets Hood Canal. The USGS has run a streamgage on it near Potlatch — station 12061500, in Mason County — measuring a drainage basin of 227 square miles. That is a great deal of mountain water arriving in one place. The ground here is flat, wide and open after days of shoreline tucked between the water and the hillside.

This is the 39th day of walking, and the point where the route changes character. Everything before it has been coastline. Everything after it points toward the finish in Olympia. The mileage was never the point on its own. The point is that a walk this long is difficult to ignore, and that every mile of it is another chance to explain what a matched unrelated donor is and how an ordinary person becomes one.