Merrill Excavating

About Merrill Excavating

The blade drops, the diesel settles into its low working note, and the pass begins — down and back, down and back, until the pavement shows dark again. That is the craft of it: reading a driveway's pitch, stacking the banks where they won't slide back, leaving a clean line along the edge of the grass so spring finds it whole. Merrill Excavating handles snow removal in Salem, New Hampshire, where the Spicket River runs under a skin of ice and the wooded granite rises toward Canobie Lake go quiet and blue in a storm. The reward arrives around five in the morning, when someone steps out into a cleared drive beneath a sky that hasn't finished emptying, and the whole street is still asleep. Salem and its neighboring southern New Hampshire towns get their mornings back, one pass at a time.