From the road

She packed up the tent that morning and went looking for a lift back to the four miles she had already covered the day before. She found one at a car wash: a man named Tony, who drove her up the highway, had a good visit with her on the way, and photographed the QR code that hangs round her neck before he left.

She was in Everett by two in the afternoon, early enough to feel good about it, and spent the rest of the day doing the thing the walk is for. At Everett Fire Station #1 a firefighter took the information and said he would put it in front of the crew who were in that week for training.

Then the city council. The board had helped her bring an old sample proclamation up to date, so she had something to hand across. When her turn came she said that her granddaughter was diagnosed with leukemia at a month old, that a stranger’s marrow saved her life, and that the council could make a difference by proclaiming a bone marrow awareness day. They were nodding before she finished.

Afterwards the woman who handles the proclamations said she had not understood quite how long a walk this was, and set about finding her a bed for the night. A police lieutenant and one of his officers sorted it out. She had a shower, washed her clothes by hand, and someone put them through a dryer for her in the morning.

A short one. She found somewhere to put the tent early in the evening — tucked away, and safe enough that she could leave the big pack behind and walk two miles up the route and two miles back again without carrying it. That took four miles off the next day, which is the kind of arithmetic that matters six weeks out.

She has asked a great many strangers for a great many things this week, and she has settled into a way of doing it.

She left Fred Hutch on a bright Monday morning and the questions started almost straight away. People stopped her on the road to photograph the sign on the back of her pack, or the tag she wears round her neck with the QR codes on it. A Russian woman. Minash, from India. A crew of firefighters who said they would pass the word on. It was Labor Day, and the city was full of people from everywhere.

The walking was harder than the map made it look. Out of Fred Hutch the hills were steep, and 20th Avenue took her down a footpath, down a long flight of wooden steps and along a trail through the trees before turning up a climb so steep she was afraid the pack would pull her over backwards. For the last ten yards she took it off, swung it ahead of her a few feet at a time, and followed it up.

Finding somewhere to sleep took the rest of the evening. A pastor would have helped and was not allowed to. The police had no vouchers left. A fire station could not put her up, or let her pitch the tent inside its yard. In among all that, a man named Minaj working the counter at a 7-Eleven bought her a coffee and a power bar — he could not simply give them to her, he had to ring them through — and then paid for the car that carried her on. The man driving it was called Mohamed.

It was dark by the time she was back on her route, and she does not like walking in the dark, but there were sidewalks and there were streetlights. She stopped at a place called Sunnie’s Express, where they let her charge her phone and rest her feet until closing, and then she carried on until she found somewhere safe to put the tent.

Jeana Moore’s granddaughter Jada was one month old when she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. The man who matched her, Torsten Huber, had joined a donor register in Germany more than a year before Jada was born — for no reason, on an ordinary afternoon, for a patient who did not exist yet.

That is the whole argument of this walk. A registry cannot conjure up a donor on the day a child is diagnosed. The names have to already be on the list.