Americans - a restless people on the move

You don’t have to drive for very long in the States before you find yourself stuck behind a slow-moving house. There is a lack of fixity which appeats peculiar to Americans. No matter what the diversity of architectural style, an air of slightly rackety impermanence shrouds these abodes.

But People in America move, they always have. They moved to get there in the first place, and then moved again for land, gold, work or just the thrill of going somewhere new.

Ghost towns stand as relics of this tradition, signposted with pride as if their empty, decayed structures told the American story better than the towns and cities presently throbbing with living inhabitants who for the most part have come from somewhere else, or are going there. For Americans the god forsaken deserted homes seems to speak of the romantic vigour of those who moved on, more than the waste and abandonment of what they left behind.

But but for a European, (I've lived ere all me life, me father lived here before me and my chidren will live here after me) the rootlessness of Americans is a central curiosity,