Emma Creek runs quiet along the edge of Hesston, a modest stretch of water lined with cottonwoods and walnut trees that Emma Creek Tree Service keeps pruned and cleared, and by the coldest part of winter that creek often carries a skin of ice beneath branches gone bare and gray. The crew's summers go to pruning and clearing deadwood along the creek and through the tree-lined streets near Hesston College; in the cold months, that same knowledge of the town's trees gets put toward clearing the snow that gathers thickest in their shade. Hesston is a small, orderly town, its streets planted with enough shade trees that a fresh snow catches differently block by block, deeper under the old growth than out in the open. The crew clears those shaded stretches first, then moves out toward the wider lots near the edge of town, where the wind has already done some of the clearing on its own. By the time Hesston's streets fill with the day's first traffic, the ice beneath its oldest trees has already lost its grip.