Before dawn the Chemung valley fills with a low fog, and the lots and driveways of Horseheads sit under it, blue and silent, waiting. NextGen Environmental, LLC is out in that hour with plows and spreaders, pushing the night's accumulation back to the edges and laying salt where the melt will refreeze by morning. Snow this far up the hills does not ask permission; it comes down through the dark and is simply there at first light. The measure of the work is a person stepping outside at seven and never once thinking about the ground beneath them. Horseheads and the towns around it, from the first storm of the season to the last.