Desert monument captures history on stone
In a forlorn stretch of desert, a tirelessly inquisitive Frenchman confidently builds his History of Humanity.
By Mike Anton
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 16, 2008
FELICITY, CALIF. — A stiff wind blows grit across Jacques-Andre Istel’s latest and greatest undertaking, a History of Humanity etched on hundreds of granite panels a few turns of a tumbleweed from the Arizona border.
He understands if you don’t immediately understand.
“You might ask: What qualifications do I have to write a history of humanity?” says Istel, 79, who is French by birth but American in his individualism. “Well, I would ask: What were my qualifications to design parachutes when I was a banker?”
Good point. Istel has always zigged where others zagged. He is a tireless wayfarer with an insatiable curiosity and no tolerance for boredom, who has pingponged through life like a character in a picaresque novel.
He fled Paris with his family in advance of the Nazis. He hitchhiked across the U.S. when he was 14. After a stint in the Marine Corps, he chucked a career on Wall Street to take up parachuting — which he learned by leaping from a plane with virtually no instruction. He eventually fathered the sport of sky diving in America. Later, having grown antsy running a business, he circumnavigated the globe in a twin-engine airplane, at times not certain he’d make it.
In the mid-1980s, he founded the town of Felicity on about 2,800 acres of California desert. He built a marble-and-glass pyramid the size of a large garage and proclaimed it the Official Center of the World; thousands have paid a couple of bucks each to step inside, even though it’s not even the center of Imperial County. More recently, Istel moved 150,000 tons of dirt to create the nearby Hill of Prayer on which he built the Church on the Hill — even though he’s not particularly religious.
“You’ve got to admit, that’s interesting,” Istel says.