The James River Valley around Aberdeen is about as flat as northeastern South Dakota gets, black farm ground stretching to the horizon in every direction once the corn and soybeans come off in the fall. Dahme Construction Co Inc builds on that same open ground come spring and summer, and when winter closes in, turns toward clearing the driveways and building pads scattered across that same flat country, where nothing stands between a field and a farmyard except maybe a windbreak of trees somebody planted decades back. Snow out here rarely just falls and stays; a clipper system blows through, drops a modest amount, and the wind spends the next two days redistributing it into drifts that have nothing to do with how much actually came down. This crew sizes up a farmstead's layout — which way the buildings and tree rows sit — to guess where a lane will drift shut first, then clears that spot before it becomes the only blocked stretch on an otherwise open road. Out where Aberdeen's edge gives way to the valley proper, a cleared farmstead lane is often the only stretch of bare dirt visible from the road for a mile or more.