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Turns out, the pandemic wasn’t over.

When I made the flight reservations for the trip, our children had just received their first dose of vaccination. Soon, we’d be an entirely vaccinated family, fulfilling the goal President Joe Biden set for a July 4 barbecue with extended family in Colorado — after a week in the jewel of the American national park system.

Then the delta variant came to Missouri. Right around the time we were donning our masks at the airport, ominous headlines returned to the Show-Me State: “DELTA HEIGHTENS WORRIES� screamed the lead headline in the Post-Dispatch on the day we left.

We soon left such worries behind. That’s what time in nature will do if you let it. The blue skies, awesome landscapes, the pristine waters of the Gallatin and Madison rivers, the prancing baby bison and the mama bear chasing after her two cubs. The combination of our own vaccination and God’s breath of fresh air delivered daily in one of the most beautiful places on earth wiped our minds of worries, other than the one expressed by my teenagers that I would never stop talking in the voice of Yogi Bear.

Back home, where Missouri’s early laissez faire attitude was giving it the distinction again as being one of the worst places in the country for stopping the spread of the virus, the news was bad. “DAILY VIRUS CASES SPIKE,� the newspaper said. Then: “IN THE MIDDLE OF A CRISIS.�

The news from one’s home looks different from afar. As we talked with people we met from all over the country, many of them, too, had seen the headlines about Missouri. They told of how easy it was in their states to access vaccine early. I talked of driving nearly three hours away. They talked of mask mandates and cooperative efforts. I explained Missouri’s rural-urban divide, and a governor who said people could make up their own minds.

In so many ways, Yellowstone and its entrancing beauty is a celebration of one America, that place where we can come together while getting away from it all, and see natural geysers and remnants of volcanic explosions from tens of thousands of years ago, roaming bison, an elusive fox, and a grizzly meandering through a mountain meadow without a care in the world.

Coming home, however, was a bit of a slap back to the reality of a divided country. Hospitals in Springfield hit new records with COVID-19 patients, higher than at the beginning of the pandemic, as Missouri’s vaccination rates continued to lag the nation, particularly in the rural counties that had eschewed masks from the beginning.

How bad is it? Steve Edwards, CEO of Cox Hospital in Springfield, was issuing calls for respiratory therapists on Twitter, begging people to get vaccinated, and pointing out that pediatric patients were rising: “If you are making wildly disparaging comments about the vaccine, and have no public health expertise, you may be responsible for someone’s death,� he wrote. “Shut up.�

More than a year and a half into the battle against the pandemic, the struggle is much like it was when it began. It’s a fight against misinformation, often spread by those who could help the most by just urging everybody to get a vaccine, or — as we did in airports on vacation, and might have to start doing in public again in Missouri if the delta variant cannot be stopped in its tracks — mask up.

I misplaced my favorite mask on vacation. Perhaps someday it will turn up, as a marker of a different time, picked up by a traveler a generation from now, seeking respite from the rat race, and wondering what life was like during a forgotten era when America lost its way.