The night before a nor'easter has its own weather along Jericho Turnpike: traffic thinning early, salt staged, radios murmuring, everybody watching the same band of color crawl up the coast. RAF Services Inc. spends that evening getting ready and the next day and a half not stopping, lots and driveways plowed, entrances and walks shoveled, salt spread as fast as the storm undoes it. Snow here likes to finish with a hard clear freeze, which makes the last pass matter more than the first. Between rounds there is coffee, wet gloves drying on the dash, and the odd hush of a commercial strip with nobody on it. Then the sun comes up on bare blacktop and the whole thing looks easy.