While making our way to Yellowstone National Park by automobile, we took a side trip to see Bear Lodge Butte, better known as the Devil’s Tower, in eastern Wyoming. Famously featured in Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” with Richard Dreyfuss sculpting the shape with mashed potatoes, the odd structure does evoke images of alien landings, especially when seen up close. Several indigenous legends attempt to explain its odd striations, and the story we heard was that seven girls and their brother were playing in the area when the boy turned into a bear and began chasing the maidens. They came to a rock formation which began to rise into the sky, and the bear attempted to climb after them, its claws gouging the rock as it climbed. As the bear closed in, the Great Spirit plucked the girls up and placed them securely in the sky in the Pleiades star cluster where the bear could never reach them.
We looked for signs of the bear or of UFOlogists seeking an encounter with an alien spaceship, but only found a base of boulders making a climb difficult. We were told that some folks have made that climb, though we did not see anyone try.
Instead of finding aliens, we found COVID. I’m not sure where we contracted it — possibly by staying at one of the lodging places along the way — because, for the most part, we were alone in our car or walking in the open air, avoiding other tourists as much as possible.
We had all of the previous shots, but had not had the most recent booster, and so we found ourselves coughing, seemingly due to allergies or the sulphur that permeated the air when we drove through Yellowstone. It was not until we were visiting friends in Montana and driving through Glacier National Park that the coughing became a concern, but not enough of a concern to keep us from helping our friends celebrate their church’s 75th anniversary and serve as judges in a chili contest.
It was not until we were returning home that we got a call informing us that our hosts had contracted COVID, although no one else in the congregation was complaining of symptoms. A COVID test, however, showed that we had the disease — a finding that hastened our return home where we could quarantine until the danger of passing the sickness on had subsided.
We were fortunate that we had some immunity from the previous vaccines, and did not suffer any serious illness. The CDC’s guidance had come through for us.
Noah Smith has written about the doubters who question the efficacy of vaccines, pointing out that some of what they say is true: “Antivaxxers … claim massive health risks from Covid vaccines. But while any vaccine carries some risk — a good friend of mine went into anaphylactic shock from a COVID shot, and had to go to the emergency room — the idea that these risks are commonplace is just highly improbable. Most of the human beings on the planet have received a Covid vaccine, and there is no great worldwide epidemic of myocarditis or any other serious side effect,” he wrote.
“Now, this doesn’t mean there was nothing to criticize in the way vaccination policy and messaging were handled in the U.S. The effectiveness of the mRNA vaccines developed against the original virus definitely decreased when the virus mutated, making initial reports of near-100% effectiveness look overly optimistic. And it’s perfectly legitimate to question or even denounce the use of vaccine mandates in a case where a vaccine doesn’t provide much protection against viral transmission, only against hospitalization. It’s also perfectly legitimate to argue that the way the vaccines were rushed through the FDA’s trial process set a bad precedent.
“If antivaxxers had limited their messaging to criticisms like these, they would have had a reasonable case. Instead, they did not. They developed a vast ecosystem of quack theories, folk knowledge, and misinterpreted or even falsified ‘facts’, and they made their case primarily on social media with a neverending torrent of invective, memes, and hysteria. This is the exact opposite of skepticism; it seeks not to test the claims of science, but to dogmatically denounce those claims by any means necessary.”
It is troubling that social media platforms continue to censor valid complaints about how the vaccines were handled in the belief that any criticism will cause “vaccine hesitancy”, when what is needed is an honest discussion of the risks and benefits, just as other drugs contain disclaimers to warn vulnerable individuals of the danger and the need to consult with their physicians.
In our case, we were advised to quarantine ourselves for five days, followed by five days of masking to make sure we’re not continuing to transmit the disease. Otherwise, we’re good to go as far as conducting business as usual.
Had we been abducted by aliens at the Devil’s Tower, we might not be resuming our regular schedules as quickly, but — who knows? — it might have been more fun than living with COVID for a week.
Do you have a story to tell?
The News Café is a virtual meeting place where, each weekday, we discuss the news of the day: local, statewide, national, and international. Subscribers can share their knowledge, thoughts, and questions about any topic, and we may select some of those subjects for more in-depth analysis.
The News Cafe is a reader-supported publication. Although the posts are available to all subscribers at no charge, I appreciate the financial support for the time and resources it takes to do this work. Please consider “upsubscribing” to a paid subscription. Either way, thank you for being here.
Join in the conversation through chat or notes by downloading the Substack app or going to the online site.
Also see our new Substack news site, By The Way.