A trip to the Official Center of the World is, well, trippy if not intriguing. But it’s well worth a sidebar stop if you’re cruising Interstate 8 a few miles from the California-Arizona border and bored of the vast, flat, snooze-inducing sand and scrub-strewn landscape slowly eating up the horizon miles to your destination.
Out of nowhere, you first see rising out of the Sonoran Desert dunes, an eye-catching and curious bright-white chapel with a distinctive big blue door situated atop a high earth mound protruding from the flat line of the surrounding area. Then (do your eyes deceive you?) a towering sandy-pink colored pyramid.
In California. In the middle of nowhere.
This nowhere is the town of Felicity, population two, consisting solely of the Museum of History in Granite, a 2,600-acre monument area that showcases the Official Center of the World. It’s marked by a plaque inside the 21-foot-tall pyramid that you come to observe close-up is made of red granite and glass.
It’s the centerpiece and nexus of founder Jacques-Andre Istel’s vision back in 1986 to build and set in stone (granite, to be precise) a “monument to humanity” that captures meaningful historic moments spanning back to the dawn of time to celebrate mankind’s existence on the planet for visiting aliens of the future to learn just what we got up to.
Istel, now 95, is a colorful character with an acclaimed background. He’s hailed as the inventor of skydiving as we know it today after being a military parachutist and reinventing the equipment to be more forgiving and allow anyone to fall from the sky from shorter distances without being killed on landing.
As the story has been retold many, many times over the last decades by Istel and his wife Felicia to anyone who will listen, when they landed on their sparse patch of desolate desert amid a smattering of remote RV parks in what was then mostly no-man’s land, he dreamed up the plan to honor important people, events and places by building gargantuan, professionally engraved granite monuments.
But first Istel’s vivid and quirky imagination envisioned the need for a town, named after his wife, which he persuaded the local Imperial County Board of Supervisors to establish with its own freeway exit sign, the Istels as the only two residents and Jacques-Andre as the unopposed mayor of Felicity.
And then the building and granite-engraving began.
Twenty monuments, a chapel, a pyramid and a smattering of random unrelated manmade monoliths later, the Official Center of the World is a testament to the couple’s tenacity to fulfill Istel’s vision.
The 100-foot-long and almost 5-foot-high triangular granite monuments each feature 60 panels recording thousands of topics. You can read chiseled explanations of the Ten Commandments, the Crusades, the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, the concepts of timekeeping, music, numbers and navigation. Others honor wars and the military, including the French Foreign Legion and the United States Marine Corps (Istel served as a lieutenant in the Marines). One documents the history of the parachute. There are chiseled explanations of the Pythagorean Theorem, the Big Bang Theory, Hinduism and the Hundred Years’ War, with panels showcasing U.S. politicians and presidents.
Many of the granite engravings are testaments to monumental moments in history. Others make you wonder how the thousands of topics are chosen. Most make some kind of sense, some don’t and a fair number are either curious or just plain head-scratchingly humorous. There’s an etched ode to the TV mute button, a factoid that 60 percent of all sandwiches consumed are hamburgers and one telling how President James Madison wanted a secretary of beer (Congress did not approve).
Together these manmade monoliths form The Museum of History in Granite—a time capsule treasure-trove, as the Istels say, that thanks to the triangular granite engineering should last at least until the year 60000. Their hope is that any outer-space visitors can get a well-rounded earthly education or at least be mildly entertained.
After you’ve mused over the monuments, made a wish at the Center of the World pyramid plaque and hiked to the highest point in Felicity—the 35-foot-high Hill of Prayer to see the blue-doored Church on the Hill—you can saunter back down to ogle Felicity’s sundial, cast to replicate Michelangelo’s “Arm of God” that points to the church or stare in wonder at a section of the Eifel Tower’s original iron stairway going skyward to nowhere, mostly wondering why it’s here.
