One decision can travel farther than any one walk.

It rained on her for the first time. Not heavily — but it had come down all night, and she walked the whole day in rain gear with a cover over the pack. She was especially glad of the Van Dams that morning: an early start, a breakfast with a great deal of protein in it, and Becky dropping her back on the route at half past nine. It was Becky who suggested the Skagit Valley Food Co-op as a place to find a bed in Mount Vernon.

Seven and seven-tenths of a mile took her to the Skagit Valley Food Co-op in Mount Vernon, with a few more still to go into the middle of town. Somewhere along the way she worked out that she is now closer to the Canadian border than she is to Seattle.

A couple at the co-op saw the pack and asked what she was doing. She told them about enrolling donors, and about Jada, and that she relies on other people’s generosity for her food and her bed. They told her to go and get something to eat and they would pay for it. She had a hot meal out of it, which after a wet morning is not nothing.

The thing she wanted written down happened about halfway through the day. She was crossing an overpass, heading for the old Highway 99, when an old Chevy truck pulled up on the far side of the road. She walked over to it. The man behind the wheel wanted to know whether she was all right — that was the whole of it. There was a young black labrador on the seat beside him. She told him what she was doing and that she was fine, and he smiled and told her she would be going to heaven, and drove on.

Nobody at the co-op was able to put her up, and the places she rang had nothing either. She was walking towards a Methodist church she had found on a map when she passed St. Joseph Catholic Church in the middle of its evening mass. She waited for the end of it, and asked Father Carlos whether there was room for a tent. He said there was.

Fifteen miles out of Arlington, and the longest day of the walk so far. She managed it on a day pack again — the family who had taken her in the night before ran the heavy one up to meet her at the finish. Somewhere in the last stretch the road crossed out of Snohomish County and into Skagit.

The winery at the end of it could not put her up, for insurance reasons, so Becky came and collected her instead, and she and her daughter Jenny made up a bed indoors rather than start pitching a tent at that hour. Fifteen miles is a long way to walk before you are allowed to stop.

Jeana wanted something said about that family. She has spent this week asking strangers for food and for somewhere to sleep, and she thinks the asking is only half of it.

She started the morning at Marysville Fire Station 62, and told them about Roy Chelsen. He was the man at Engine 28, on East Second Street, who twenty-five years ago to the day found a way out along a brick wall and under a pedestrian bridge and got his company clear of the North Tower. In December 2005 he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, and the search for his marrow donor became a public appeal on behalf of everyone else waiting. His story is on the Foundation’s Heroes page. The crew were moved by it, photographed her sign, and said they would pass on how to join.

Then 67th Avenue Northeast, which has next to no shoulder and a great deal of traffic. It made for slow going — a few steps, then off the road onto the lip above the gully, every time a car came. She walks facing the traffic and catches the drivers’ eyes, so she knows she has been seen.

Just after noon a white van slowed and stopped beside her. The woman driving wanted to tell her the Centennial Trail was close by, and led her round to a side street where they could talk away from the highway. Jeana explained the walk, and that she relies on the generosity of other people for her food and her bed. The woman apologised: there was no room in the house. Jeana asked whether there might be room in the garden for a tent. She smiled and said they live on a farm — so there was plenty. Her name is Becky.

So the last miles into Arlington were walked on the Centennial Trail with nothing but a day pack, because Becky had taken the heavy one home ahead of her. There was a shower at the end of it, and a hot dinner, and a tent pitched inside an outbuilding in case it rained in the night.

It is a house with three generations in it, and Becky’s daughter Jenny took to the thing Jeana has been carrying all week along with everything else — that a pack teaches you very quickly the difference between what you want and what you need, because you will carry what you need and the rest is only weight. Jenny passed it on to her own children the same evening. Jeana calls it a lovely family and says so twice.

The schedule had a bone marrow awareness day in Everett on it, but the work was already done — the city council, the police department, the fire department — and she did not want to outstay her welcome. On the way out of town she called at Everett Community College and at Providence Regional Medical Center and came away with contacts at both. Then she walked on towards Kruse Junction, in Marysville.

Just under eight miles, and a beautiful one. The road out of Everett crosses water again and again — Union Slough, Steamboat Slough, Ebey Slough — and every bridge had a walkway on it. She notes that she was on the right-hand side of the road for once. She usually walks facing the traffic.

Partway along she realised she was walking on Tulalip tribal land, and rang the Tribes. They gave her contact details so the Foundation can write to them about joining the registry, and about whether they would like to host a stem cell donor event.

Marysville had no rooms in it — a concert at one of the casinos had taken them all — and three hotels turned her down before she passed St. Mary’s Catholic Church. The woman at the desk sent her to Father Peter, who thought about it carefully and offered her the crying room at the back of the sanctuary. Then he did better than that, and arranged a room at the Quality Inn instead; a woman named Deb drove her over, and arranged to bring her back to the route in the morning.

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.