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.
He doesn't mean himself. Istel is talking about his History of Humanity, eight horizontal monuments spread out like spokes of a wheel between the church and the pyramid. When completed, it will serve as a Cliffs Notes of life on Earth: 416 kitchen-counter-size granite panels etched with words, timelines and drawings.
"How do you treat our galaxy?" Istel asks, pointing to a panel describing the Milky Way. He doesn't wait for an answer. "This one's interesting. . . ." And he is off to the next panel, another subject meticulously researched and condensed.
The Greek philosophers. Early music. Buddhism. The Han Dynasty. Early timekeeping. Ireland's golden age of scholarship. The evolution of math. Our sun. The night.
