Chris Lawson Excavation

About Chris Lawson Excavation

Inland from the harbor, where the San Juan Valley opens into pasture and the lavender rows stand cut back for winter, Chris Lawson's truck works the long farm lanes that most visitors to Friday Harbor never see. The island's hard freezes tend to arrive at night on a north wind funneling down from the Roche Harbor side, and by morning the cattle gates and wheel ruts are sheeted in ice. Getting those lanes scraped clear before a farmer's truck needs to leave for town is the whole reason this crew starts before sunrise instead of after it. Fog off the Salish Sea often sits low in the fields until well past dawn, so headlights do as much of the early work as the plow blade does. It is quiet, exacting work on an island where every road eventually just runs out at water.