On my way to Sandusky I got several offers of jobs. A road surveyor and his man, trundling and springing along the road in their car, nearly ran me down, and as a compensation for my experience of danger stopped and gave me a lift, offering also to give me work if I wanted it. All the highway from Cleveland to Toledo was to be macadamised by next summer; thousands of men were wanted all along the line, and I could get to work that very afternoon "farming ditches on each side of the road" if I wished.
I jigged along three miles in the automobile and then stepped down to make my dinner. Whilst I was lighting my fire a Bohemian came and had a little chat with me.
"How far ye going?"
"Chicago."
"You should get on a freight train. I come up from New York myself on a freighter and dropped off here two days ago. It's too far to walk; you carry heavy things. Besides, there's a good job here mending the road. I've just been taken on. A mile up the road you'll see a waggon; ask there, they're making up a gang. The work's a bit rough but the pay good."
Then I came on a gang of Wops and Huns loading bridge-props and ribbons and guard-rails on to an electric trolley, and the boss again applied to me.
"No, thanks!"
A man with an asphalt and coal-oil scatterer came past. His was a dirty job. He sat behind a boiler-shaped cistern, which another man was dragging along with a petrol engine. It had a rose like a watering-cart, but instead of water there flowed this dark mixture of asphalt and oil. The man, a Lithuanian, was sitting on the rose, his legs were dangling under it, and it was his task to keep his finger on the tap and regulate the flow of the fast-trickling mixture. Though a Lithuanian by birth he spoke a fair English, and explained that the asphalt and oil laid the dust for the whole summer, and solidified the surface of the road, so that automobiles could go pleasantly along. There was another machine waiting behind, and they had not men to work it. If I liked to report myself at the depot I could get a job, it was quite simple, not hard work, and the pay was good. He got two dollars a day.
Then, as I was going through a little town, a Norwegian came running out of a shop and pulled me in, saying, "You're a professional, no doubt, stay here and take photographs"; and he showed me his screens and classical backgrounds. It was interesting to consider the many occasions on which I might have given up Europe and started as a young man in America, entering life afresh, and starting a new series of connections and acquaintances. But I had only come as a make-believe colonist.