FALMOUTH, MI -- It’s been 12 weeks since David Ebels died of COVID-19 at age 57.
It’s been eight weeks since his 53-year-old brother Paul died of the virus.
As co-owners and operators of Ebels Hardware in Falmouth, they were two of the most well-known residents of Missaukee County, prominent members of a prominent family.
While most of Michigan is celebrating the winding down of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ebels’ tight-knit, rural community is still reeling from the deaths and trying to make sense of it.
For some, the takeaway message has to do with the mysterious ways of God, and trust in the redemptive powers of Jesus Christ.
For others, it’s a cautionary tale about a community that viewed the pandemic with skepticism, only to pay a deadly price.
And for still others, it has to do with the capriciousness of the COVID-19 virus. Indeed, the story of the Ebels brothers includes a crucial twist that puts their deaths into a much different context and shows how the pandemic can defy easy narratives.
It’s also a microcosm into Michigan’s 2021 spring surge, and the painful story of how so many communities and families entered March thinking they had dodged a bullet during the pandemic, only to be crushed by tragedy just as vaccinations were offering a way out.
“Our community has been rocked.” said the Rev. Dirk Koetje, pastor of Prosper Christian Reformed Church in Falmouth, whose members included Dave and Paul Ebels. “We’ve learned lessons. We’ve been humbled. We’re in the process of picking up the pieces.”
The heart of ‘beautiful downtown Falmouth’
Missaukee County is located in the northwest Lower Peninsula, just east of Cadillac, south of Kalkaska, and about 45 minutes from Traverse City.
In population, Missaukee ranks 61st among the 68 counties in the Lower Peninsula with about 15,000 residents. The county includes the cities of McBain and Lake City.
The area was settled in the late 19th century by Dutch immigrants, some of whom came directly from the Netherlands and some by way of Dutch settlements in the Grand Rapids area. Many were farmers, but Missaukee also had a burgeoning timber industry that offered an alternative.
More than a century later, Missaukee still reflects its Dutch heritage, from the predominance of blond hair and blue eyes, to the Dutch surnames, to the Christian Reformed churches that dot the region.
Much like the Zeeland-Holland area of West Michigan, Missaukee residents tend to be evangelical Christians who extol the virtues of faith, family and a strong work ethic. But while Ottawa County has become an affluent, fast-growing part of metro Grand Rapids, Missaukee has remained a sparsely populated farming community. Last November, 76% of Missaukee voters backed Donald Trump, making it the No. 1 Michigan county in Trump support.
“This is a very rural, very conservative county,” said Star Hughston, a Missaukee County commissioner. “Not in a bad way. Just everyone works super hard. Just very hard-working.”
Koetje, who has five young children, calls it “one of the best places in the world to raise a family. People love one another. They care about one another. They meet others’ needs when there’s a need. Basically, it’s small-town America.”
Many of the families have been here for generations, including the Ebels.
“When you talk about names that have been around forever here, Ebels is one of them,” Hughston said. “Everybody knows them.”
Back in 1920, Chris Ebels -- great-grandfather of Dave and Paul -- opened Ebels Hardware and Farm Implements on Main Street in the unincorporated town of Falmouth.
Chris Ebels billed it as “The Biggest Little Store in Missaukee County,” and he wasn’t wrong.
Today, the Ebels family has a sprawling retail complex along Prosper Road. To the extent that people come to Falmouth or even know of its existence, it’s largely because of the Ebels.
Dave and Paul and their three other silblings -- Steve, Mark and Mary -- are all prominent residents of Falmouth.
David and Paul and their wives ran Ebels Hardware, a mammoth operation that sells everything from farm equipment to guns to sweatshirts to typical hardware stock.
Across the parking lot from the hardware store, Mark and his wife and children oversee Ebels General Store and Ebels Meat Market, known for its Little Town Jerky. Duane’s Restaurant, which also is part of the complex, was started by the siblings’ Uncle Duane Dick and Aunt Carolyn in 1978,
Mary and her husband operate Great Lakes Dairy Supply, a dairy distribution company down the street. Steve, the oldest of the five siblings, is the Clam Union Township clerk.
In the past decade, the Ebels -- particularly Mark Ebels -- have become even better known through television commercials in which they urged people throughout northern Michigan to visit their stores in “beautiful downtown Falmouth.”
While TV turned Mark Ebels into somewhat of a local celebrity, Dave and Paul had high profiles, too.
At 6-foot-10, Dave was the more dominant presence, both physically and in terms of personality. He was a jokester, person who liked to tease in good fun, but also someone who frequently shared about his Christian faith.
Paul was quieter, but “very kind, generous and always an advocate for the underdog,” said his daughter, Abby DeZeeuw. “People who never felt they belonged anywhere else always knew he would make space for them.”
They were true community leaders, Koetje said.
Dave and Paul were “very well-respected, very well-liked,” Koetje said. ”They were big supporters of this church, our local Christian school, big supporters of the pregnancy resource center in Cadillac. Big supporters of a lot things financially as well.
“They were successful businessmen who were very generous.”
But it went beyond deep pockets Koetje said,
“People felt comfortable around them,” he said. “They would have people who go in there and share their problems -- like, my marriage is breaking down, or this, that or the other -- and often they would go in the back and pray with people. So they had a way of meeting people’s needs. Not just their business needs, but their personal needs.”
The pandemic
Business actually went up at the Ebels’ stores during the pandemic, said Bob Ebels, the son of Mark Ebels and one of the family members who runs the Ebels General Store and the Meat Market.
But many Missaukee County residents chafed at Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s handling of the pandemic and her administration’s emergency orders and mitigation strategies.
“It’s pretty anti-Whitmer here,” Bob Ebels said.
Ask Missaukee residents about compliance with the mask mandate during the pandemic and they laugh. Many have stressed “common sense”: Don’t get too close to people; wash your hands; stay home when you’re sick. The rationale for masking -- it’s an airborne virus in which those infected are most contagious before they show symptoms -- often has been lost in the swirl of misinformation over the past year.
Part of it is politics. But part of it, too, is just the culture of northern Michigan communities, where libertarian sentiments run deep; self-reliance and resilience are prized virtues, and people tend to downplay illness and injuries.
Missaukee residents “knew the pandemic was real,” Hughston said. “But they weren’t going to change their whole lives over it.”
Once Prosper Christian Reformed Church resumed services after the spring 2020 shutdown, Koetje didn’t impose a mask mandate and few congregants wore them, he said.
A big part of it that it was hard for them to see fellow church members as posing a health risk, he said.
“Part of it is, ‘hey, we’re a family.’ The people around here do value -- maybe to a fault sometimes -- being able to smile at one another,” Koetje said, adding with a laugh, “And they also value people not telling them what to do.”
Bob Ebels said he often wore a mask, but didn’t pressure his customers about it. “We’ve got signs up (about the mask mandate) but we have businesses to run, too,” he said. “I don’t have staff to chase after people to say, ‘Put your mask on.’ That’s just how we played it.”
And the truth is, for much of the pandemic, Missaukee County seemed impacted much more by the various shutdown orders and restrictions than the virus itself.
The county reported only 114 cases total through the first six months of the pandemic. While cases surged over the winter and there were 16 deaths between November and January, the majority were among elderly people including eight deaths at long-term care facilities.
The general sentiment was that COVID-19 was essentially a concern for elderly people or those in poor health. For those who prided themselves on healthy living and a strong immune system, the virus didn’t seem to pose much of a risk.
It helped that Missaukee residents tend to live “socially distance anyways,” Koetje said. And Missaukee isn’t in the same situation as Cadillac or Traverse City, where locals worried about hoards of tourists bringing in the virus.
And even when local residents were catching the virus, it didn’t seem to be that serious during the first year of the pandemic, Koetje said.
“We had some unhealthy people in our church get it, and they beat it relatively easily,” he said.
“That starts causing people to let their guard down to some degree,” he added. “As the vaccine was getting rolled out, I actually had a conversation at the end of February, like, ‘Hey, I think we’re beyond’ ” the pandemic.
But Koetje spoke too soon.
“Then March came, and we got hammered,” he said. “At one point, I think we were one of the top five counties in the country” in new coronavirus cases.
The Ebels
Ebels Hardware was among the Missaukee County businesses that didn’t enforce the state’s mask mandate.
Dr. Jennifer Morse, medical director for the District 10 Health Department, said the health department got periodic complaints about the store. “It was not good,” she said.
But it wasn’t just about politics for Dave and Paul Ebels.
The Ebels have a family medical history of hearing loss. Paul was profoundly deaf and communicated through lip reading.
“So that’s one aspect of story that’s not so simple,” Koetje said. “Life was impossible for Paul when people wore masks.”
“Uncle Paul could not have a conversation with you if you had a mask on, period,” said Bob Ebels.
Abby DeZeeuw, Paul’s daughter, said her “biggest stressor throughout the COVID-19 crisis was the knowledge that my dad’s ears required every person he talked with to take down their mask so he could read their lips.”
“There was no other way for him to ‘hear’ and continue to operate the business,” she said. “I always knew he would get COVID, but I prayed that he would be one of the lucky ones who would make it through unscathed.”
In March, DeZeeuw’s worst fears came true.
The B.1.1.7. variant of the virus swept through Missaukee County. As a much more contagious strain of COVID-19, it meant that communities with low mask compliance were particularly hard-hit. The B.1.1.7. variant also resulted in a sharp spike in deaths and hospitalizations among younger adults.
The spring surge was “profoundly different” than Missaukee’s previous experiences with COVID, Bob Ebels said.
“Over the course of the first year of the pandemic, we did not have one person from our congregation go to the hospital because of COVID,” Koetje said. “Then we had six people during the first two weeks of March. So it was a different ballgame, and that was eye-opening for us.
“It was scary,” he added. “I had never felt scared the whole time, but this was like, whoa.”
At ages 57 and 53, Dave and Paul were in the most vulnerable age group for the spring surge -- too young to be vaccinated as the surge hit but old enough to be at higher risk for severe COVID.
Soon after coming down with symptoms in early March, the brothers were both hospitalized in Cadillac.
“When they were first admitted to the hospital, I thought, OK, they’ll get through it,” Bob Ebels said. “But then the news came on (March 24), and it became real. It became real really fast.”
On March 24, the families were told that both Dave and Paul needed to be airlifted to Grand Rapids for more specialized treatment. Paul, in particular, was in critical condition. But then Dave suddenly took a turn for the worse and died before the airlift could occur.
“It was shocking,” Bob Ebels said. “I was in Florida at the time and when I got the text, I dropped to my knees and yelled out loud. I couldn’t believe it.”
Paul made it to Spectrum Hospital in Grand Rapids, but died April 20.
The hardware store is now being run by the brothers’ widows and their adult children, Bob Ebels said. “They’re sorting it out, but those were big shoes to fill.”
Not to mention the huge, emotional wallop of losing two family members to a virus that didn’t even exist two years ago.
“It’s a tough, tough situation,” Bob Ebels said. “But we’re a Christian family and we believe that we’ll see them again and we’ll be reunited.
“We believe God’s got a plan for everything, and on the day that Uncle David and Uncle Paul were born, God knew the day that they were going to die. And if that’s what he had planned. we can’t change that.”
The fallout
While the Falmouth community was stunned by the death of the two Ebels, it hasn’t seem to change many minds about masking.
Even at Dave Ebels’ funeral service in late March, when less than 20% of Missaukee adults were completely vaccinated, a majority of people in attendance were not wearing a masks.
In talking about masking, Missaukee County residents frequently reference the importance of “respect,” and specifically being respectful of differing opinions on masks.
“People here are just real respectful of everybody’s choices,” Hughston said. “Some people wear a mask and some don’t.”
It’s a frustrating stance for Morse, the county medical director.
The Ebels’ deaths “are the kind of things that break your heart,” she said. “When you see such resistance (to mitigation strategies), these differing opinions, and then you have something happen that could have been preventable.”
On the other hand, while the deaths did not shift opinion about masking, it appears to have spurred an increase in vaccinations.
At this point, 48% of Missaukee residents age 12 and older have had at least one dose of vaccine. That’s below the state average of 55%, but above the 43% average among the 16 counties where Trump got at least two-thirds of the vote in November 2020.
Among those most vocal advocates for vaccinations in Missaukee County has been Steve Ebels, Dave and Paul’s older brother and the local township clerk.
Steve helped organize an April 10 vaccination clinic in Falmouth and also promoted an April 21 clinic at the township hall.
“I just simply do not want any other families to experience the pain and loss we find ourselves in,” Steve posted on his Facebook page about the April 21 clinic, which ended up occurring a day after Paul’s death.
More than 230 Missaukee residents got their first doses of vaccine on those days, state records show.
The Ebels also held a clinic at their store for employees, Bob Ebels said, and everybody in their extended family who is eligible for shots has been immunized.
His uncles’ deaths “really opened people’s eyes” about the COVID-19 vaccines, Bob said. “To have two deaths of fairly prominent guys in the community, right in a row like that, I think a lot of people had thoughts about not getting it, but then figured I’d better just get it done.”
But even with the advocacy of the Ebels’ family, vaccinations remain a touchy subject for many in Missaukee. Koetje didn’t get vaccinated himself until the end of May, saying he finally decided after doctor told him the odds of a bad outcome from COVID-19 were far far higher than the chances of a bad reaction to the vaccine.
Still, “As I was sitting in the waiting room, they handed me paperwork that said, ‘This is a trial vaccine. It has not been approved by the FDA,’ " Koetje said. “That caught my attention.”
The pandemic in general and the death of Dave and Paul Ebels in particular have made for a difficult year, Koetje said.
One of the issues that people in his congregation have grappled with is the role of God in the pandemic.
“We have a firm belief in the sovereignty of God, that nothing happens apart from God,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean you should be stupid. It doesn’t mean you should take unnecessary risks. At times, knowing where the line is drawn between unnecessary risk and (faith in God) has been difficult for all of us in the past year.”
Still, “looking back over the past year, I don’t know that people would have done things differently” if given that chance, he said. “Maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe they would.
“But a year later, I think all of us would say that are some things that we got right and there are some things we got wrong.”
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