Nickerson sits at the edge of Kansas' sand hills, where the soil turns pale and loose enough to shift with a strong wind, and the trees that manage to take root here work hard for the shade they give — which is exactly why ERT Tree Removal understands them well enough to also keep the town's driveways clear come winter. When the wind kicks up before the snow even stops falling, the same sandy ground that drifts in August dust storms holds onto a snowdrift just as tenaciously in January, piling deep against the tree lines that break up the flat Reno County horizon. The crew works the residential blocks first, blade scraping down to bare gravel and pavement between rows of cottonwoods and hackberries, then moves out toward the edge of town where the dunes and grasslands start. Salt trucks rumble through at all hours from the plant just up the road, a reminder that winter here means more than one kind of white cargo moving through the county. By the time the sun climbs over the sandhills, Nickerson's short grid of streets is bare and the day gets on with itself.