Avoca grew up around the Rock Island rail line, and the grid of streets near the old depot still runs flat and square the way a railroad town's does, easy ground for McCarthy Trenching to work fast and clean through a storm. The lots and driveways downtown get cleared first, since Main Street's short run of storefronts depends on it, then the crew works out to the residential blocks where the driveways are shorter but there are more of them to cover. A lot scraped down to bare blacktop with the plow lines as straight as the old rail bed the town was built along is a particular satisfaction of this work. Western Iowa's open ground means a clipper system can move through fast, dumping snow and clearing out again inside a few hours, so getting ahead of the storm rather than chasing it after the fact matters more here than the total inches ever do. Leaving Avoca's Main Street passable before the morning coffee crowd shows up is a small, steady win worth chasing every time.