Triton Cove: 555 feet of public shoreline

Triton Cove State Park is a day-use park on the Hood Canal shore south of Brinnon. Washington State Parks lists 555 feet of shoreline there — a little over a tenth of a mile — along with an ADA-accessible boat launch and 100 feet of handling dock, three unsheltered picnic tables, a vault toilet and trash service. People come to fish, crab and dive. A Discover Pass is required to park.

Seven miles is a short day by the standards of this route, and short days are part of how a 45-day walk gets finished at all. The accessible ramp is worth a second look while she is here: it is there so that reaching the water does not depend on being able to scramble down a beach. Most of what makes donor matching work is infrastructure of that same unglamorous kind — a searchable database, a swab kit, a prepaid envelope — built once so that it is there when a stranger needs it.

The two sides of a transplant are not symmetrical. For the patient it is a long road. Fred Hutch describes the method E. Donnall Thomas pioneered as destroying a patient's diseased bone marrow with near-lethal doses of radiation and chemotherapy and then rescuing the patient by transplanting healthy marrow, with the goal of establishing a fully functioning and cancer-free blood and immune system. That describes the technique as it was developed; what any individual patient actually receives is a matter for their own transplant team. For the donor the process is considerably shorter. NMDP, which operates the donor registry in the United States, says it pays for all donation and travel costs, including flights, hotel stays and meals for the donor and a companion, and also covers missed pay from work, pet care and childcare.