Up, up and …

Moving, as I don't need to tell anyone who's ever done it, is the worst. Also the best. The worst because you can't belieeeeeve how much stuff you have. The best because it forces you to de-acquisition the collection.

I mention this because next week, VT is moving from just north of Richmond, Virginia, to just south of Los Angeles (2,629 miles, says an Internet map site; driving time, 39 hours, 1 minute).

I have been involved in other office moves. It is never pretty, and it always comes down to this: Get some Dumpsters. Sometimes a couple, sometimes a flotilla. Regardless, office-loads of perfectly good stuff gets trashed because it's too expensive to move it.

Not here. Except for the computers and maybe 30 cartons of absolutely essential material, almost nothing is being shipped to California because it really is too expensive to move it that far. That leaves a lot of stuff in Virginia. But it was understood from the get-go that nothing from VT would wind up in a landfill. So there has been an all-hands effort to re-use, recycle, re-purpose, re-sell, re-something every single item in the office, down to the mishmash of coffee mugs.

Mountains of back issues have gone to nutrition centers. A church group took 12 of the 21 bookcases, and the rest are all getting new office lives. Every plate, cup and water glass is going to a fresh-start "pantry" for released inmates. Heaps of film have been recycled by our production director. Local libraries and used bookstores have carted off hundreds of cookbooks. The bright blue paper-recyling bins are stuffed, emptied and stuffed again. All the furniture is being sold. The rest--posters to white boards, file cabinets to philodendrons--is all getting a second chance somewhere.

Without the benefit of a single Dumpster. Has it taken longer than the average move? Yes, but not a ton. It's mainly involved networking around for buyers and recyclers instead of shopping around for the best deal on Dumpsters.

Was it worth it? You bet. Still, there's no way to calculate how many trees, fossil fuels or chunks of forest were saved, so you just hope it adds up. But sometimes there's proof that indeed it does. That happened this week. A half-century after its last sighting, the ivory-billed woodpecker with its yard-wide wingspan--better known by its marvelous nickname, the Lord God Bird--turned out to be not extinct but alive and soaring in the Big Woods of eastern Arkansas. It survived because the forests it needed hadn't been cut down. A great note to fly off on.

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