Bush’s Snow and Mow

About Bush’s Snow and Mow

Otho sits so close against a bend of the Des Moines River that the bottomland fields around it hold onto fog long after the rest of Webster County has burned it off, and in winter that same low ground collects the first heavy snow of any storm. Bush's Snow and Mow works a town small enough that a single pass down the main street touches nearly every driveway in it, river mist still hanging over the fields at the edges. There's an intimacy to working a place this size, knowing which driveway floods with drift first, which yard sits low enough to need a second pass by afternoon. The river itself goes still and gray under the cold, banks crusted white, while the crew moves between houses that have watched that same water rise and fall for generations. By evening, smoke curling from chimneys along a cleared street is about as good a sign of a job done right as this town offers.