The chasm between the rich and the rest in Teton County is bridged by an uneasy alliance between the wealthy owners of vacation homes and the lower-income residents who depend on them for their livelihoods. The county has the country’s widest disparity in income between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99. Now the pandemic is laying bare the tensions of that relationship as service workers must choose between continuing to do jobs that may expose them to the virus, or risk the loss of wages, health insurance and eviction. All three of the area’s ski resorts shut down about a month early because of the pandemic, and restaurants and the national parks are closed.

“It’s disgraceful to see people not understand the severity of the problems,” one airport worker told me. “It makes it uneasy to provide the services we do to these kinds of people. I live paycheck to paycheck and I don’t have much saved up in my account to handle” a serious illness.

The rural West lures many because it seems like a different world. It is wilderness without the snares and moral traps of the city, populated with mythical people — the bohemian ski bum, the dusty cowboy. This romantic facade is especially appealing to the stressed-out superrich because it connects them to nature and bygone small-town character, as I discovered doing research for a book examining the ways they see themselves and other people — especially their rural neighbors.

Now the small wealthy communities that dot the West and other remote parts of the country have come in handy as places to hide from the pandemic.

But it turns out you can’t outrun the virus.

Teton County has 57 confirmed cases of Covid-19, the highest number in the state after the much more populous Laramie County, with 62. But Teton County far and away leads Wyoming in the rate of cases, with 242.9 per 100,000 people. (An additional three cases were of people who had home addresses outside the county.) As of Tuesday, no one had died in the county, but health officials don’t expect the number of cases in Wyoming to peak until the end of the month.