Ground Control

About Ground Control

Where St. Cloud loosens into open country, the wind gets a running start — it combs the summer grass in long silver waves and, come winter, carries snow sideways across the flats until it finds a fence line or a driveway to fill. Ground Control is a fitting name for a crew that contends with all of it. In the green half of the year they hold the line with mowers, keeping lawns level and tight against everything the prairie sky pours down. In the white half they hold it with plows, clearing what the wind delivers and re-delivers. The work is a running conversation with weather that never quite ends. Their answer, season after season, is the same: ground kept in order, whatever comes over the horizon.