The beau thought we should go wine-tasting. I had no problem with that. We packed up some provisions and got in the car.

So we drove over the mountains and into the winery-laden Santa Ynez Valley. We had no real plans; we just roamed. We picked up some sandwiches in Los Olivos. We took a detour to Solvang and procured some rocky road fudge. We stopped off at a few wineries along the way, but kept striking out on good picnic spots. So we just kept going.

We ended up way north in the valley, far outside the normal winery circuit. We finally found a place named Rancho Sisquoc with a number of picnic tables in the sun, and proceeded to spend a lazy couple of hours tasting wine and snacking on sandwiches and fudge. On our way back out to the road we found an old American Gothic church with an overgrown cemetery. Seriously. Check this shit out:

That’s some serious business.

At this point in the afternoon it was getting kind of late, so we pointed the car towards home. We were passing Lake Cachuma on the 154 when the beau suggested we try to find a scenic area and have some drinks.* He took a turn for a lookout point over Bradbury Dam.

As far as dams go, this wasn’t a particularly, um, scenic one. Consisting of almost all parking lot, the place was surrounded by trees that blocked all views of the lake save for a small clearing directly overlooking the dam, which was guarded by a rusty rail. The only place to sit down was a lone picnic table under a scraggly tree. Not promising. Not to mention I was feeling sleepy and allergic. But the beau had already mixed up some vodka drinks in plastic hypercolor cups, so I rallied and we ambled over towards the “view.”

On the way there, however, we spotted a small trail down a hill. We set off down the trail eagerly for several yards only to have our hopes for adventure dashed by a barbed wire fence. There was, however, a hole at the bottom of the fence that looked just big enough to fit a person. We looked at each other and shrugged. He held my drink while I ducked and shimmied underneath, then passed the cups to me through the fence before he scrambled through.

I was wearing highly inappropriate footwear for this spontaneous and illegal hike—cheap flats with absolutely no tread. We passed copious amounts of poison oak as tiny rocks gathered in my shoes. Just as I was starting to second-guess our decision the trail once again came to a dead end, this time on the shore of the lake. There we encountered a gorgeous, sweeping vista. The water stretched out to either side of us. Big white puffy clouds sped by overhead, chasing their shadows over the mountains. We stood there for several moments amidst the sun-bleached branches of dead wood and the deer tracks, sipping our vodkas.

Suddenly, a fish jumped out of the water to my left. “Hey, did you see that fish?” I asked the beau, but he was too distracted to answer because he was really digging into his pocket. I pretended not to notice and kept looking off to the left where I’d last seen the fish jump, like it was the most sincerely interesting section of water I’d ever seen. Then the beau said, “I love you.” So I turned around to look at him and he asked, “Will you marry me?”

He was holding out a ring. “Yeah!” I said. I took the ring from him and for some bizarre reason told him, “Thank you!” Then for one long moment we stared at each other like deer in headlights, and then he suddenly began to sink like he was going to drop to one knee. I grabbed his elbow and murmured, “No, no, no!” He stood up again, uncertainly. I slipped the ring on my finger and exclaimed, “Wow!”

We were engaged.**

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* Yes, we had brought a cooler full of booze to accompany our wine tasting trip. Stop looking at me like that.

** Entirely unintentionally, we got engaged exactly 50 months to the day after we met. Strange thing, that. My friend thought it was silly, but I liked it. It feels auspicious when the numbers line up and click into place, you know?