B.E. Contracting

About B.E. Contracting

Long before the first commuter swings onto White Marsh Boulevard, the sodium lights are still doing all the work and a blade is already writing one clean black line down a driveway. B.E. Contracting is a snow removal outfit working this corner of Baltimore County, where MD-43 runs east toward the water and a storm can come up the Gunpowder valley with nothing much to slow it. Weather here has a split personality — heavy and wet nearer the river, lighter a few miles up the hill — and half the job is knowing which one you got before the plow touches pavement. What the work is after is a specific, unglamorous beauty: pavement scraped to the seam, de-icer laid exactly where the refreeze wants to start, a driveway that lets a car out at six without a second thought. By full daylight the street has forgotten the whole thing, which is the idea.