I have a trove of memories from the times I spent with Hilario Martinez in Colombia, the most vivid among them his reaction when I relayed news reports in 1975 that said some Americans were eating dog food. We were in a Chinese restaurant in Bogotá, and the image so contradicted Hilario’s preconceived notion of America as the land of plenty that he put his hands over his ears and shook his head “No!” while hunched over his plate slurping a single spaghetti noodle.

For my purposes, Hilario was perfect. I needed someone to handle on-the-ground tasks that an importing business requires in the country of origin – purchasing the products, shepherding them through customs, and shipping them to the states. Most importantly, I needed someone who was honest, as Colombia was notorious as a land of thieves. I traveled with the people, and they were always warning me of the dangers.

I’ve played the author game enough times to recognize the life cycle of ink on paper in the Digital Age. And, barring a lightning bolt, I’m certain that the coffee table book Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National: The Folk Hero and the Forest He Loves, will be a Limited Edition of 250 copies.

While Andy and I discussed running this project through a nonprofit, we chose to do it ourselves, with the transparency and conscience of a nonprofit, professing social missions from the start.

Here’s a report.

We had learned in Cartegena that artisans wove the wall hangings in a crafts village about a hundred miles south of Barranquilla. Almost a month to the day after I flew to Colombia the first time, Victor and I were on a bus to San Jacinto to pursue my evolving vision of an international cottage industry with a social conscience.

That ride was straight out of Romancing the Stone – ancient, loud, brightly painted buses with Jesus statuettes on the dashboards; stony-eyed locals with bags, boxes, crates, babies, birds, and pigs jamming every cubic inch of the seats and aisles; and drivers who stopped for anyone and anything on the roadside, no matter how packed their vehicles.

We disembarked at a shop called the Almacen La Feria de las Hamacas. With Victor translating, I negotiated with one of the proprietors, while sipping a warm Coca Cola, my beverage of choice in 1974 Colombia. No water was potable for non-natives, not even in the mountains, I would later painfully learn.

My first trip to Colombia on my way to the Amazon River was actually pretty ridiculous. Travel was never a priority in my family, and by 1974 I had only been out of the country twice — camping in Canada and breaking for spring in Negril, Jamaica, my senior year at Indiana University. The only Spanish my buddy John and I knew were leftover snippets from introductory Español in high school and college.

The only draw the place held was hand woven, cotton wall hangings that, John said, were marketable to home decorator-type Americans. A bonus was that Colombia truly was an exotic culture, something I had wanted to experience since I read my first National Geographic in the John Marshall High School library in Indianapolis. And it was a photographer’s paradise, what with a Caribbean Coast, the Andes Mountains, and a port on the Amazon River.

When Pablo Escobar scotched my plans to photograph the Upper Amazon Rainforest in 1976, I turned to the closest jungle I could find to satisfy my innate desire to journalistically explore the woods – the Hoosier National Forest.

Exactly one year after my first trip to Colombia and precisely one year before my last, I had floated up a flooded Saddle Creek Valley surrounded by steep, densely forested Hoosier National hillsides. From the bow of that small wooden fishing boat on Lake Monroe, I captured my first images of what would become a lifelong photographic pursuit.

I didn’t know in May 75 that I was viewing the Hoosier National through a camera lens for the first time. But I did a month later when my guide and buddy Eagle Scout Tim Hoffman led my Irish Setter Shannon and I, full pack on my back, to a campsite on a ridgetop above Patton Cave, whose mouth overlooks the Saddle Creek.

To suggest Tabatinga’s Mirador Komara is the best place for sunset over the Amazon River would be folly, given the enormity of the river’s geography. But the outdoor club on the southern outskirts of the Brazilian city would make any list, especially if sipping caipirinhas and local culture watching are goals.

Called Mirante da Comara on Google Maps, the popular nightlife destination lies bankside across a wide expanse of the Amazon where it reunites on the Brazilian/Peruvian border after a brief channel split that encircles the island of Santa Rosa, Peru. Both names translate as Comara Viewpoint (or Vantage Point), which proved the perfect punctuation to our only experience in Brazil during our week on the Upper Amazon.

Before I begin relating my four-decade tale about Andy Mahler and Me, I want to share an observation from my granddaughter Raina, which I know you all will intuitively appreciate.

A month before he passed, I brought her and her brother Vale down to the Lazy Black Bear, I guess, to say goodbye. A few months before that, Rain had spent an afternoon exploring this hidden fantasyland in the woods with her bff Ayturk, while Andy and I talked. As we were leaving that last time, she proclaimed with an unforgettable smile on her face:

“This is the most magical place I’ve ever been.”

I’m no expert on James Joyce’s place in literary history. But as we strolled along the Grande Canal de Trieste, I knew I was walking in the literal footsteps of the writer for whom an old college friend once earned class strokes for calling “the most innovative author of the 20th Century.”

Along the canal bank stands a statue of the Irish novelist, who for 16 years lived in Trieste, where he began writing Ulysses. Two years after he left the small Italian port in 1920, his masterpiece was published in Paris.

Just across the bridge to the south, the James Joyce Café occupies the corner of Via Roma and Via Genova.

When we sat down in Santa Rosa, Peru, for our first experience on the world’s greatest river, the thought of a military jet flying over the Brisas del Amazon restaurant to send a hostile message was totally counterintuitive.

We had landed in Leticia, Colombia, the morning of June 15, 2024, checked into the port city’s Waira Suites Hotel, and walked to our first encounter with an iconic, tri-border sign saying we were in Colombia and would cross into Brazil if we continued straight, or Peru if we turned right.

When we emerged from the as-far-as-I-can-tell unnamed Leticia tributary onto the Amazon River itself, daughter Jessica told her sister, niece, and nephew, “I’ve never seen dad smile so much.”

Thanks to the incredible interest and generosity of our friends, pre-orders of Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National will be delivered the week of Sept. 26.

I have approved the final electronic proof. The presses are scheduled to roll on Sept. 23.
While Andy sadly will not be joining me as we had hoped, I will be the solo guest at two public events in Bloomington following its release:

– Morgenstern Books: Slideshow and talk, Oct. 28, 6-7 p.m.
– Juniper Gallery, Book Club Author of the Month, Nov. 19, 4-5:30

I will also be the featured speaker at the annual Heartwood Reunion in Orange County on Friday, Oct. 3.

It’s with deeply conflicted emotions that I announce StevenHiggs.com is offering pre-orders of our latest book Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National: The Folk Hero and the Forest He Loves.

Andy passed away on Aug. 30, 2025, two days before the 130-page product of our 15-month collaboration was ready for the printer. He did, however, gleefully embrace a copy of the second draft two weeks before he died.

The 8.5×11, full color coffee table book is intended to spread the word about the equally remarkable stories of Andy’s life and his career as a forest activist. The journey begins with his family’s escape from Nazi Austria in 1938 and ends 87 years later with his passing at his home in the middle of the Hoosier National Forest.

Bloomington’s Limestone Post magazine has posted an outstanding article by Anne Kibbler titled “Andy Mahler: Folk Hero of the Forest” about Andy and our book collaboration.

Anne writes a compelling piece about the day she spent with Andy and I traipsing around the backwoods sections of the Hoosier National Forest in Orange County that the U.S. Forest Service calls Buffalo Springs, where they want to clearcut, burn, and chemically spray 30,000 acres.

Here’s her lead to the story.

“A journey through the Hoosier National Forest with Andy Mahler is a spiritual quest, a melding of a mind deeply attuned to the environment with the physicality and majesty of the surrounding trees.”

I will publicly unveil StevenHiggs.com and my new coffee table book Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National: The Folk Hero and the Forest He Loves on August 15 in French Lick, Ind.

The occasion will be the annual gathering of the Indiana Democratic Party, which will give Andy a Legacy Award for his lifetime of contributions to the party, region, and state. I will be introducing Andy at the dinner and have been asked to include the following in my remarks.

“Andy has worked the polls for many years, ran for commissioner and been an active citizen at many county and state meetings, representing values our party believes in, in addition to the grass roots organizations he has initiated.”

Simply put, the 114-mile drive from the picturesque Austrian city of Villach to the Italian harbor town of Grado — by way of Slovenia’s Soča River Valley — is a photographer’s grail, especially if the itinerary is set by a master photographer.

I made the journey in the fall of 2023 with one such escort, my Berliner friend Thomas, whose photo stops started at Italy’s Predil Lake and Predil Pass Battery in the Alps; passed through the Slovenian villages of Bovec, Kanal, Dobrovo, and Medana in mountain and wine country; and ended at Southern Italy’s Palmanova, Aquileia, and Grado on the Adriatic Sea.

The region’s imagery and history left me in awe.

Leticia has occupied a magical place in my imagination for two thirds of my life – hard as that may be to believe.

Colombia’s only port city on the Amazon River is neither famous nor glamourous. It has a population of 33,000 and occupies the northern third of a two-city complex with Tabatinga, Brazil.

Much of Leticia’s charm lies in its status as Colombia’s entryway to South America’s Upper Amazon River, a photographic destination I’ve imagined for a half century.

Exploring the Austrian Alps wasn’t a goal that ever made my bucket list. Neither was traveling through Europe, for that matter.

No, my wanderlust has always been inspired by indigenous cultures. But while Europe didn’t make the list, neither did it appear on my never list. My ancestry traces to 16th Century Europe and, if given an opportunity or a reason, I would obviously jump at the chance,

Both appeared in Spring 2023, when my Colombian friends Estela, Luz, and Patricia, whom I hadn’t seen since 1976, contacted me. They now live in Austria and Spain and invited me to visit.

I’ve viewed the world and recorded my life’s travels in 35mm rectangles my entire adult life, from a boatman’s view of the Hoosier National Forest in my 20s to the same waterborne perspective of the Amazon Rainforest in my 70s.

So any “retrospective” of my life’s work, as I’ve described the purpose of StevenHiggs.com, will feature a heavy dose of photographs and words from my travels, beginning with my latest from the Alps to the Adriatic Sea to the Upper Amazon River.

This blog’s headline was the original title for our upcoming coffee table book planned for release this fall.

But as the project’s epic scale became apparent, the name evolved into Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National: The Folk Hero and the Forest He Loves.

So Andy’s stand against U.S. Forest Service plans to log, burn, and chemically spray 30,000 acres of the Hoosier’s Orange County woods called Buffalo Springs — in the name of ecological restoration no less — became the book’s final chapter.

As the About page explains, I cannot say exactly what this website will be, aside from serving as a repository for my ongoing, half century of work as an environmental photographer and journalist based in Southern Indiana’s Hoosier National Forest country.

But there will be a heavy emphasis on the Hoosier National, which I began exploring, photographing, and writing about exactly 50 years ago.