Victoria is the corner this walk turns, not the place it stops

Victoria is the capital of British Columbia, at the southern tip of Vancouver Island. The Hudson's Bay Company post that became the city was renamed Fort Victoria in 1843, the city was incorporated in 1862, and the 2021 census counted 91,867 residents. Arriving here on foot, after weeks of coastline, the Inner Harbour is the obvious place to stop and take stock.

It is worth saying plainly what this day is not. This is not where the walk ends. From 430 Belleville Street, on the Inner Harbour, the Black Ball Ferry Line's M.V. Coho sails daily and year-round — 90 minutes and 22.59 nautical miles, about 42 kilometres — across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Port Angeles, Washington. Victoria is where the route turns: the long arc up and across the Canadian side of the Salish Sea is behind her, and the Olympic Peninsula and Olympia are still to come. Day 28 of 45.

There is a reason a water crossing belongs in a story about marrow. Cancer care on the Island is delivered here, at BC Cancer's Vancouver Island Centre — BC Cancer – Victoria — at 2410 Lee Avenue on the Royal Jubilee Hospital site, which has served people from Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands since it opened for patients in 2001. But an adult on the Island who needs a bone marrow transplant does not receive it on the Island. The Leukemia/Bone Marrow Transplant Program at Vancouver General Hospital provides care for all adults in BC and the Yukon who require one. A patient from Victoria crosses water to get a transplant.

That program performs over 200 transplants a year, and 14 per cent of them use cells from an unrelated donor — a stranger who joined a registry and was found, later, by a search. Jada Bascom's transplant was not one of those Vancouver cases: she was an infant in Washington State, and her donor was Torsten Huber, a man in Germany who had put his name on a registry after reading a newspaper article. Different country, same mechanism — a search that reaches past the family, and past the border.