John Irvine's Heaven

They made this town in one man’s vision of heaven: John Irvine’s. John Irvine set foot on this earth ‘bout sixty years ago with nothing more than a horse and a rifle. He killed forty Indian men, women, and children before he planted his feet down on the ground and claimed this land belonged to him. From there he set about creating his heaven: he built forty acres of farm stretched out across the California countryside; ruled it tightly with a hoe in his left hand and a rifle in his right. So when the Mexicans came he gunned them down and he kept his paradise amongst the fields of tomato plants he seeded into the ground.

Forty years later those forty acres had turned to forty two thousand and in those forty two thousand John Irvine had his ashes scattered to the winds all across the land he’d made in his image. His family moved on, his son went north, his wife went south, and his daughter went east to Minnesota where she and her husband raised a family ‘till she died in ’92. But Irvine stayed put, his ashes kept their roots in the ground and the company he founded kept their hands on the reigns and moved John Irvine’s heaven closer and closer to his final vision.

They started building. Girders, concrete, and bolts spurted out from the ground where just forty years past John Irvine had spilled Indian blood making the land his own. Those houses were rough: islands in a sea of ripening tomatoes and the Mexicans that manned their rows. They weren’t through: those islands sprouted brothers. Like weeds the girders sprouted from the ground, cold, earthen, and industrial, pointing their dead, unfeeling fingers towards the sky where they grasped in fruitless agony at the heaven that John Irvine foresaw. The weeds they spread more widely, adapting and changing, eating away at the water’s edge where the tomatoes lapped against the shore. Where the first few weeds were weak, their borders tenuous, their construction outdated, their colors too varied, the newer weeds were stronger: uniform, defined, matching in design, construction, in color, and in their boundaries. Most important were their new boundaries for as the weeds grow their fences became their very definition: life in Irvine came to be the distance between fences that you occupied. And it was with that defining ideological characteristic that Irvine grew into what it is today, 60 years after John Irvine’s forty acres paid for in forty souls spilled on the soil he called his.