Sogard Excavating measures Hamilton County dirt in yards and section lines most of the year, and when a real winter storm sets up over Jewell, the same machines that move earth in July are turned loose on snow instead. This is a town small enough to walk end to end, but the farm ground around it stretches for miles in every direction, and it's those open miles — county roads with nothing to break the wind — where drifts pile hardest and fastest. A storm that starts in the evening usually means a crew still working after dark, headlights the only light for a mile at a stretch, pushing a blade through drift after drift so the roads stay passable for whoever has to be somewhere before morning. The grain elevator that marks Jewell from a distance disappears entirely in a hard enough storm, and that's usually when the calls come in fastest. By morning, the section-line roads carry a single wide path down the middle, snow banked high on either side like a dirt job in negative.