Migrating

 NOW THAT WE KNOW that working from home does not kill the economy, although it might slow productivity a tad, the practice is likely to persist post pandemic. Fewer commutes, bathrobe accounting, better baby sitting. Able to work from home no matter where they live, people begin to realize that they are free to live where they choose, rather than where they must.for several decades, for most of the twentieth century, the great plains, especially the northern part thereof, the "great American desert",  has been emptying out, losing population as folks give up on it and disperse for greater opportunity to the coastal regions and the big cities of the Midwest. Kansas, Nebraska, eastern Colorado, southern Idaho and Montana, great areas of abandoned territory, are now ready to be resettled by twenty first century pioneers with computers and smart phones ready for some cheap land and expansive vistas. Half of everyone on Earth lives within a few miles of an ocean, as of now. Will we all crowd together there now, unconstrained by restrictions of employment? Its possible, though it would be disastrous, since we need to be moving away from rising waters. Beginning around 1840, Americans back East started dragging wagons by oxen across thousands of miles of pertile land, wilderness, headed for Oregon. Nobody has ever logically explained exactly why,no historian nor anthropologist. nobody knows why, nor ever has. they rolled right on through millions of acres of proven fertile opportunity in search of a dream, some fantasy they had heard advertised and held dear in their imaginations. Many never made it, their bones bleaching in the hot desert sun. Many who did were disappointed by the lack of any discernible garden of Eden, and fell into drink and ruin. People migrate for many reasons. Perhaps the most fundamental is our fundamental nature, our ancestry, our origins...Our ancestors spent millions of years as nomads, always on the move, hunting and gathering, never staying in one place long. then, they, we, invented agriculture, and began to build cities, and neolithic civilization. But having root,s permanent dwellings and cities are still new to us, a recent invention, and we are not yet accustomed to it. From force of habit we remain on the move, near where we live, if nothing else. Daniel Boone and David Crockett who tried to imitate his hero Boone, neither one could stay still for long, and were always building new log cabins, deeper in the wilderness. Boone claimed he felt too crowded in when too many white settlers arrived following his footsteps, and the Indians vanished. Crockett, who also loved Indians, always imagined, always incorrectly, that he could someday have two nickels to rub together if only he could make a new start, farther west. he never found riches, but only a heroes end, at the Alamo, still looking. And maybe that's the reality for us all, always moving, always looking...for something...because we must, because we are never satisfied with what we have and know, because there is always something beckoning to us, just over the horizon. Whatever it is we are looking for we never seem to find, but we continue looking, because we must.