Doyel Excavation

About Doyel Excavation

The Ozark plateau around Rolla is limestone all the way down — quarries and sinkholes and springs that never quite freeze, even when everything above ground does — and Doyel Excavation runs its equipment out along the backroads that thread through that karst country toward Phelps County's farms. Heavy snow behaves oddly on ground this uneven: it drifts into old quarry cuts and lies thin across the high ground between them, and a dozer blade has to read the terrain as much as the storm. The crew works out from town in the early hours, opening the gravel roads that curl around old quarry land before the morning's first traffic. There's a particular kind of quiet out on those backroads before dawn, snow and limestone both pale in the dark. By the time Rolla proper is stirring, the roads that feed it from the quarry country have already been cut clean.