Freedom, masks, and death
As the Covid body count piled up in the town of Mitchell, S.D., longtime neighbors struggled to agree on mandating even the most basic precautions, said Annie Gowen in The Washington Post.
ACOLD WIND whipped through the prairie as they laid Buck Timmins to rest. Timmins, a longtime coach and referee, was not the first person in Mitchell, S.D., population 15,600, to die of the coronavirus. He was not even the first that week. As the funeral director tucked blankets over the knees of Timmins’ wife, Nanci, Pastor Rhonda Wellsandt-Zell told the small group of masked mourners that just as there had been seasons in the coach’s life—basketball season, football season, volleyball season—Mitchell was now enduring a phase of its own. Pandemic season.
In a state where the Republican governor, Kristi Noem, has defied calls for a statewide mask mandate even as cases hit record levels, many in this rural community an hour west of Sioux Falls ignored the virus for months, not bothering with masks or social distancing. Restaurants were packed. Big weddings and funerals went on as planned.
Then people started dying. The wife of the former bank president. A state legislator. The guy whose family has owned the bike shop since 1959. Then Timmins, a mildspoken 72-year-old who had worked with hundreds of local kids during six decades as a Little League and high school coach and referee. His death shook Mitchell just as its leaders were contemplating something previously denounced and dismissed: a requirement that its staunchly conservative residents wear masks.
As Wellsandt-Zell led those mourning Timmins in the hymn “Jesus Loves Me,” the rumble of an approaching helicopter cut through the sound of the singing and the mourners’ soft tears. In Mitchell, the medical emergency helicopter, once a rare occurrence, now comes nearly every day, ferrying the growing number of people desperately ill with Covid-19 to a hospital that might be able to save them.
Sirens echoing through the empty streets of New York marked the pandemic’s first phase. Swirling blades of helicopters on the American plains is the soundtrack of a deadly fall. Oh, my God, here we go again, Wellsandt-Zell thought. Another one.
EWS OF BUCK Timmins’ death spread quickly through town just hours before the first vote. Kevin McCardle, the city council president, heard the news in a text from a fellow referee and was shocked. He had not even known Timmins was sick. How could he be dead when McCardle had seen him filling up his tank at the gas station just a few days ago? Timmins fell ill with the virus Oct. 24. Nanci was pretty sure he’d picked it up at one of the many games he went to, where people were casual about wearing masks. She had stitched Buck a mask out of quilt scraps—in the most manly pattern she could find, brown with little yellow flowers—but she wasn’t sure if he always wore it when he was out of her sight.
They both became ill at the same time, but Nanci had a mild case. Buck seemed OK, too, until about a week in, when he became weaker and weaker and didn’t want to eat or drink, or leave his old brown leather recliner. She plied him with all the flavors of Gatorade, Smartwater, and Ensure she could find, but he drank very little. Because Buck was not having trouble breathing and the hospital had patients who were far sicker, he stayed at home. Nanci, a retired X-ray technologist, administered his
Noxygen and insulin treatments.
That morning, Nov. 16, Buck woke after a restless night and called out for his wife. He mumbled something— she thought he said, “I love you”—so she wrapped her arms around his head and said, “I love you, too!” Just after noon, he was gone. They had planned on taking an Alaskan cruise together next year, but now she was alone, 10 days before Thanksgiving with a stack of bills on the table she wasn’t sure how to pay. “It’s just—not there,” she said. “So much life left, and then it’s just not there.”
Three hours later, McCardle walked into the Corn Palace, the city’s civic center and auditorium, with Buck Timmins’ death heavy on his mind. Timmins had coached in his Little League. They had refereed high school sports together. Now his eyes rested briefly on the spot in the bleachers behind the visitor’s bench where Timmins, in his role as state coordinator for high school refs, always sat during games.
McCardle had a yellow legal pad under his arm with his daily tally of coronavirus cases in Davison County since March. The growth he had been so carefully recording had exploded in recent weeks, from
359 cases Oct. 1 to 1,912 that morning, a 433 percent increase. Locally, 10 people had died in less than seven weeks. McCardle said he found the numbers as alarming as the public health officials did. He is a 57-year-old camper salesman whose biggest worry as council president before the coronavirus was cleaning up algae in the town lake. But when Susan Tjarks, the lone woman on the council, had raised the idea of a mask mandate a month earlier, he had ridiculed her for wearing one and grumbled, “You don’t see the grocery stores putting mandatory masks in. Nobody would go to ’em. They’d lose business.” Now McCardle and others on the council, rattled by Timmins’ death, listened
attentively to Tjarks’ proposal, sitting at socially spaced tables on the auditorium’s basketball court in front of murals depicting their hardy pioneer ancestors. The draft ordinance would require masks in buildings and public spaces, with a fine of up to $500 and 30 days in jail.
During the public comment section, a handful of anti-maskers spoke, alleging that masks don’t work and that the measure was an overreach that would violate their civil rights. Local doctors and nurses overrun by Covid-19 patients pleaded for help. “Every single day, I come to work and have more and more positive Covids,” said Diane Kenkel, a nurse practitioner who runs a small independent health clinic in town. “The stress on the hospital is very real. It’s really scary as a provider to come to work and have very ill people and know there might not be a hospital bed for you.” The Mitchell City Council passed the draft measure unanimously Nov. 16. But Mayor Bob Everson—one of the mask doubters— still had to issue an executive order to put it in place. And the draft had to survive what was expected to be a contentious public hearing and final vote the following week. HE NEXT DAY was a bad one, the worst so far in the pandemic, at Kenkel’s small health-care practice located in a low-slung brown brick building just a block from the Corn Palace.
After her last patient of the day, Kenkel,
62, had hung up her only blue protective gown, tucked the N95 mask that she has been using since March in a paper bag, sat down at her desk, and took a sip of the cold coffee she had been trying to finish since morning. Her poodle, Junie B., a registered therapy dog, curled up in a sheepskin bed alongside her.
Kenkel was barely out of the shower that morning when one of her longtime patients—a young mother of four—texted to say her coronavirus symptoms had worsened and she was having trouble breathing. With symptoms that acute, Kenkel would have normally sent the woman to the hospital. But there were no beds available, so she had to arrange to send oxygen to the woman’s home. After that Kenkel had a Zoom call with a firefighter who resisted going to the emergency room, because he was afraid he was going to die.
This was the week that the pandemic became personal. Four friends, including Timmins, had died. Kenkel herself was exhausted. Exhausted from having to come home, shower immediately, cook dinner while wearing a mask, then sleep separately from her husband. Exhausted from not
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