One day, a long time ago, I walked out of my old house, next to the highway that comes into the little town of Hyattville and ends a mile or so at a bridge over Paint Rock Creek ... or maybe it’s Medicine Lodge Creek; I never could keep them straight. There it transforms into a county road that will get you to Ten Sleep if you make all the correct turns. Otherwise you might find yourself climbing into the Big Horn National Forest in the mountains of the same name (although the government likes to spell it Bighorn National Forest) 

Like a lot of the Big Horn Basin, the road crosses a big, dry empty space, so a few miles outside of Hyattville you might think you are approaching the end of the earth, and Captain Kirk of the starship Enterprise might show up leading an exploration party visiting this strange planet. 

This essay isn’t about space exploration or even geography, though; it’s really about something else, so let’s get back to that.

On that long-ago day, I accompanied my whole family as we headed across the road and down a short drive to the Hyattville school. This was unusual because I usually made this trip all be myself. I was the only school kid in the group, so Mom had to stay at home to tend the others. Dad, of course, would already be at school, where he taught a few upper level kids, which is why we lived in Hyattville in the first place. If the whole family was crossing the road together, something important must have been going on. I wasn’t sure what, but a lot of other people were heading the same way, so it must have been important.

When we arrived at the school, we found ourselves in a long line heading toward three or four women behind a table. Being rather short, I couldn’t see what was going on at the table, but I couldn’t help but notice that just about every kid who walked away from it was holding one arm or the other, and quite a few of them had tears running down their cheeks. I asked my mother why that was, and she broke the news to me: I was about to receive something called a “tick shot.” This was necessary, she said, because little bugs called ticks might bite me and give me something they called “tick fever.”

It appeared to me that everybody in Hyattville was getting this shot, so I figured I might as well get one, too. I was a bit concerned that having someone stick a big long needle in my arm would hurt, so I was resigned to the fact that I would be among those who left the table in tears. When the moment of truth came, though, the shot didn’t hurt nearly as much as I thought it would, making tears unnecessary.

Now if you have ever been to Hyattville, you know that living there isn’t much different from living 10 or 15 miles in one of the drier corners of the Big Horn Basin, surrounded by cattle, sheep and assorted wildlife instead of human beings. Consequently, I believe that the shot was effective. Not only did I, nor anyone I knew, contract tick fever, I never actually saw a tick during the almost two years we lived in Hyattville. Even so, a tick shot was a sign of spring — particularly if one was involved in scouting or some other activity which might involve the great outdoors. Eventually, though, tick shots seemed to disappear.

However, the scourge of youngsters like me back then wasn’t tick fever. It was much worse. Every fall was the polio season. The very word “polio” always sent shivers up my mother’s spine. She monitored me closely whenever I had a cough or a sniffle, or complained about soreness anywhere in my body. She also insisted on dressing me as warmly as possible, even if it was Indian summer in September and the outside temperature was around 85.

Then Dr. Jonas Salk came to my rescue, followed closely by Dr. Albert Sabin, and a vaccine became available. Within a couple of years, the number of cases of polio dropped faster than a skydiver who forgot his parachute, and the disease was no longer a threat. Mom still made me dress warmly — because the vaccine didn’t do anything for a simple case of sniffles — but that’s to be expected. She was still a mother and nothing’s perfect.

Given my experience with these vaccinations, along with dozens of others I’ve experienced, I have considerable trouble understanding why intelligent people in America are refusing to be vaccinated against COVID-19. They all have some sort of rationale for avoiding the vaccine, but I haven’t heard one objection that’s logical.

But I have heard hospitals all over America are overloaded with those people.