Kanawha is small enough that Hancock County's grain elevator and water tower are still the two tallest things for miles, landmarks a Nieman Excavating driver can navigate by even with a whiteout closing in from the west. The company's summer work — cutting building pads, digging foundations, moving dirt for drainage — uses the same machines that, come January, get fitted with plow blades instead of buckets and sent out to open the town's short streets and the farm lanes running off them. North-central Iowa winters here tend to arrive as wind first and snow second, ground blizzards that pile drifts across a road that was clear an hour earlier, so a single pass in the morning is rarely the last one of the day. The crew knows the low spots on the county roads outside town where drifts form fastest, the same low spots that flood first in a wet spring, because it's the same land studied in two different seasons. By the time the elevator's lights come on for the evening, the roads into and out of Kanawha are open again.