Photo by Steven Higgs.
Andy Mahler says he was stunned at his friends’ reactions to news that he has Stage 4 cancer.
“Steve, this is where I’m so humbled and grateful, because I had no idea,” he told me, while resting on a downed, bench-sized tree limb in his beloved Orange County woods.
After his doctor said Andy’s hip pain was cancer that had spread to his bones, the 73-year-old says he accepted the path ahead. He prepared to give up his body, “ideally painlessly and in ways that allow for those near and dear to me to be able to fill in the empty places.”
But when he dropped the dreaded news on the public six months ago: “Everybody said, ‘Uh-uh, you’re not dying, not if we have anything to say about it. You, my friend, are important to us. We want you to stick around.’”
For whatever time he has left, Andy has enthusiastically embraced their dictate.
“I’m determined to honor that love that’s been shown to me.”
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I wasn’t even mildly surprised at the outpouring of love and support directed Andy Mahler’s way.
I’ve known and written about him for four decades now. The first chapter in my 1996 IU Press book Eternal Vigilance: Nine Tales of Environmental Heroism in Indiana was titled “Andy Mahler: Saving the Forests.” He’s one of the most charismatic and beloved figures to have ever evolved from the college town of Bloomington, Ind.
I met him in 1985 when I was The Herald-Times environmental reporter, and the U.S. Forest Service made the fatal mistake of proposing off-road-vehicle trails near the Lazy Black Bear, the lodge and homestead south of Paoli where Andy and wife Linda Lee, for forty-five years now, have forged their lives in the Southern Indiana backcountry.
In response to the ORV plan, Andy, a child of the 60s, inspired a citizen uprising. He worked with friends like Bob Klawitter to form the seminal Indiana forest preservation group Protect Our Woods, or POW, which partnered with neighbors and forest lovers from around the region and state to oppose the dirt bike trails.
Not only did POW and company stop the ORVs, they worked with a statewide coalition of groups, including ForestWatch, Hoosier Environmental Council, Sierra Club, and Izaak Walton League, to force the agency to withdraw a plan to clearcut 81 percent of the national forest – and, more significantly, to replace it with the Conservationist Alternative, one of the most environmentally sensitive forest plans in the nation.
In 1991, after helping shut down commercial timber harvesting in the Hoosier for decades to come, an invigorated Andy founded Heartwood, a multi-state coalition of forest activists who work to stop national forest logging from the Appalachians to the Ozarks and from the Great Lakes to the Deep South.
He was happily retired when the Forest Service in 2021 proposed clearcutting and burning across a 30,000-acre area called Buffalo Springs all around and right up to the Lazy Black Bear. He re-entered the fray and has been influential, at least for now, in stymying the government-sponsored chainsaws and drip torches one more time.
Forty years after Andy created Protect Our Woods, the Fund for Wild Nature named him the Grassroots Activist of the Year for 2024 for his work on Buffalo Springs.
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After following a barefoot Andy to a second stop at a small waterfall over a limestone ledge, I turned the discussion to his childhood and early career as an activist. But that, and planned future walk and talks, are topics for another time.
Mission No. 1 of this early June bushwhack through the deep spring forest was to talk about his diagnosis, assuming he’d want to. And as expected, he was more than happy to share.
“I’m grateful for the opportunity to speak to people without having to leave home,” he says, his chiseled features and radiant, silver hair and beard illuminated by a sudden, narrow shaft of sunlight filtering through the closed hardwood canopy overhead.
“As soon as I say that the sun comes out and shines right on me,” he says. “I’m not saying that proves I’m a child of god, but ever since I was a little kid, I felt like I was sitting in god’s hands.”
Today, those hands firmly but tenderly clutch Andy Mahler at the Lazy Black Bear.
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Andy Mahler’s found art sculptures. Photo: Steven Higgs.
A guy like Andy landing in a lush, 270-acre inholding surrounded by national forestland in southern Orange County, Indiana, may seem incongruous with his early life.
He grew up in Bloomington – BHS Class of 69 – when the Southern Indiana college town was called the “Berkeley of the Midwest” for its flourishing antiwar, free speech, and social justice movements. His parents were academics, and the family traveled widely.
As a kid, he lived in Brazil and a suburb of Paris for a while.
But Andy’s wisdom, charisma, charm, and leadership abilities are perfectly congruous; they’re ancestral, rooted in his genes.
He’s a descendant of the Bohemian composer Gustav Mahler – a.k.a. “Uncle Gus.” Father Henry Mahler was a trailblazing Indiana University scientist who was known as “Mr. Mitochondria” for his groundbreaking work in cellular biochemistry.
At the dawn of his adulthood in 1979, Andy chose to leave Bloomington and join Linda in the Orange County forest, where she had settled a decade earlier, not really to grow up, he laughs, but to be in a place where the median age wouldn’t always be 22.
“People would often ask me, ‘Did you grow up in Bloomington?’” he says. “And I would say, ‘Nobody grows up in Bloomington. That’s why people live there. You don’t have to grow up.’”
And aside from his extensive Heartwood travels throughout the eastern heartwood region and across the country, Andy hasn’t traveled that much since he came to live in the trees.
Any travel plans now that his life trajectory has been indelibly altered? None whatsoever.
“I got to do some of that when I was a kid.”
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The Lazy Black Bear, along with Linda and his legion of friends, are all Andy Mahler needs – end of story. His bucket list is empty.
To the contrary, Andy says it’s an incredible blessing to know where home is and be able to just be there. Leaving is not an option.
“The truth is, as much as I love the beach, and the mountains, and distant friends, and all of those wonderful, wonderful things that are available to those who travel,” he says, “there’s no place on earth I’d rather be than right here.”
Right here, it is so deep in the landlocked Midwestern deciduous forest that there’s an unlocked Forest Service gate that blocks Andy and Linda’s driveway to keep the campers from the primitive campsites right across the dead-end gravel road at bay.
He’d of course love a running river nearby, a mountain within walking distance, or the sound of slapping waves reverberating up the hill. But his Orange County forestland has its own beauty, rhythms, and inherent character, he insists.
“And the more I get to know it, the more I invest myself in it, the more absolute brilliant acceptance, love, and forgiveness I get in the embrace of this place.”
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Photo by Steven Higgs.
To the point of this first bushwhack chat – Andy’s initial reaction to his diagnosis.
“I was prepared to just face my death and figure out what I needed to do to take care of Linda and, of course, this little dog here who’s just come into our lives, not that long ago. This is Wagner.”
An armload of a little terrier mix with fox-red hair and white nose, toes, and highlights, Wagner accompanies us on our couple-hour stroll through an undulating landscape saturated with every conceivable shade and tone of green. He later warily watches Andy shower under the small, icy cold waterfall, where we stop for part 2 of our conversation.
One of many epiphanies Andy has had since his February diagnosis supplanted his initial inclination to submission – the realization that having a terminal disease doesn’t mean you’re going to die. At least, it doesn’t mean you’re necessarily going to die of that particular disease.
“Gravity is getting us down,” he says. “But the reality is we don’t know who’s going to be the next in the queue, so to speak.”
It could be the sicker among us, like Andy. But often it’s the healthiest and most vibrant who succumb to terrible illness or horrific accident.
“I’m not the only one who has a terminal condition,” he says. “You have a terminal condition. Everybody who hears these words has a terminal condition.”
As for death: “I don’t fear it in the slightest.”
Quite the opposite, Andy considers himself healed.
“I feel reborn and completely in control to such an extent that I have absolutely no interest in being in control of my own circumstance.”
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Andy Mahler knows he has lived an extraordinarily full life. But, as most people do, he now feels he was sort of sleepwalking through it before his diagnosis, before his rebirth.
“There’s nothing like your own potential, imminent demise to get you to just stop – and pay attention,” he says, little Wagner fully ensconced on his lap, a look of supreme contentment on his face.
Life, he has relearned with new appreciation, is a moment-by-moment proposition. The morning of our hike, for example, Andy had an insight: longevity has less to do with how many seconds you have, but rather how much you have in each second.
“In each second you have the opportunity for extraordinary depth and fullness of experience,” he says, acknowledging the idea is not new, though he’s not sure it’s ever been expressed quite like that.
Joy is available to everyone every second, he adds.
“Joy does not mean blind, giddy excitement like a game show participant,” he says. “Joy is recognizing what an extraordinary privilege it is to be alive, even as you experience anger, fear, and grief, which we all experience.”
Living life fully and deeply each moment is the key, Andy says.
“The more you do so, the less you’re inclined to worry about what comes next.”
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To the extent that he’s allowed “longevity in time,” Andy says he has three “jobs.”
First is to breathe.
Second is to acknowledge his deep and profound debt to whatever force is responsible for him having had the opportunity to be alive, he explains, “just worship that force which connects all of us to each other in such a deep and fundamental way.”
Third is to make art.
“I like to make stuff out of junk,” he says, referring to himself as an exterior decorator. “I find junk. I put it together in ways that amuse me, and that makes me happy.”
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Andy has a clear sense that death is mere illusion.
Yes, he says, everyone’s bodies decay. And we all eventually experience death through our loved ones.
“But nobody experiences the instant of their own death,” he says. “I mean, people have had near death experiences, but nobody has actually survived death and come back to tell us what’s on the other side.”
All that is really known: “Once you go through that door, you don’t come back.”
But that is not the end of your life, he says.
“Your spirit is in everyone who knew and loved you, and that doesn’t go anywhere.”
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Photo by Steven Higgs.
Just before I turn off my aging Tascam recorder on the log and we start for the waterfall, Andy elaborates on an earlier reference to his “metaphor of the cicadas.”
“I’ve admired cicadas my whole life,” he says.
One species lives seventeen years underground, with no light or sound, Andy notes. And yet, they live, completely isolated and alone, for nearly two decades until something calls them forth, and they begin their journeys to the world above ground.
“They get to that surface and, suddenly, this body, this physical form, the only container they’ve ever known to keep whatever is inside them in one place, it breaks open in the back,” he says.
And what’s inside, in its soft and nascent form, pulls itself through that crack in the back, and the cicada experiences its first exposure to sunlight, first exposure to the entire visible spectrum, first exposure to sound, first exposure to the air beneath their unfurling wings.
“So, I figure, why isn’t something like that available to us in our physical form?” he says.
Indeed, Andy sometimes feels that crack opening in his back.
“That’s part of what this diagnosis was for me,” he says, “the crack opening in the back of my exoskeleton.”
For the time he has remaining, Andy Mahler says, he’ll see each second as an opportunity for extraordinary depth and fullness of experience.
“What I’m wanting to do is just figure out how to celebrate as much as possible in every instant that is left to me,” he says, “in this realm and in whatever realm might come next.”
