South of Pekin the ground turns sandy and the road runs out past Powerton's cooling water, where the wind off the flats has nothing at all to hold it. Topless Tree Service works from there back into town and up the terraces to the old streets, taking tree removal jobs in tight side yards and doing the tree trimming and pruning that shortens a limb back to a live branch instead of lopping a crown off square. When a front pushes up the Illinois River valley and drops half an elm across the fence, storm damage cleanup is a matter of hours rather than weeks — cut, hauled, swept, gone. There is a quiet kind of pride in a tree that keeps its shape after a hard blow because somebody thought about it two seasons earlier. By the time the river fog burns off, the yard is back in order.