Don Green's Dirt Service

About Don Green's Dirt Service

West of St. Cloud the streets thin out into Stearns County townships — long gravel drives, machine sheds, mailboxes a quarter mile from the house — and out there a snowed-in lane is not an inconvenience, it is a wall. Don Green's Dirt Service knows ground the way a dirt outfit has to: what it does frozen, what it does thawing, and how to move what winter piles on top of it. When a system rolls down out of the northwest and buries the county, they push it back — driveways, approaches, the long stretches where drifting wind rebuilds the same bank twice in a day. It is heavy, unglamorous, necessary work, and there is a deep satisfaction in a lane punched all the way through to the road. In this part of Minnesota, that is what open for business looks like.