Out past the last streetlight, east-central Illinois runs flat and open, and a January wind can carry a whole field's worth of snow back onto a driveway hours after the sky has cleared. Sand Valley Sand & Gravel works those hours — the dark ones before dawn, when Danville is still asleep and the section roads out toward Oakwood are one long white blur under the headlights. Plowing, salting, cutting back the drift that builds against a windbreak: it is unglamorous work done in exhaust steam and cold hands. The payoff arrives at first light, when a lot is bare black pavement again and a driveway has two clean shoulders of snow standing exactly where they belong. Getting people out on time on a morning like that is the entire point of the job.