Beers and Beards

I stared out over the hills with a knot in my heart. The feel of the wet air on my face. The sun beating on my brow.

‘Modeled upon the intersection of the lived experiences of Peter Roughtuff.’

Well, now we knew what that meant.

“It’s home…” I whispered, then shook my head. No, home was on Erd now. This was Beautiful British Columbia, though nowhere I recognized. The surrounding hills and the mountains off to the east looked alot like the scenery around the Okanagan Valley, while the forests far to the North looked more like the coastal rainforests of Vancouver Island. Not to mention that there should’ve been a wide winding river of blue cutting through the hills, not whatever tha Nether that bloody ocean was doing off to the West.

I glanced at the trellises and shivered. I had a pretty good guess what the vines covering them were. They looked identical to the stock Canadian Tire trellises we’d purchased when we’d first started winemaking. If the vines on them were the same, they’d be the finest Cabernet Sauvignon grapes money could buy. We’d gotten them from one of our neighbours, who’d been more than happy to come and spend hours explaining the ins and outs of the cutting and planting process.

The original owner of our vineyard, or Chateau, as we winos were wont to callthem, had been growing Pinot Noir, and we’d found the bloody things to be a bit too temperamental in the southern valley. Pinot Noir preferred a cool spring, and sometimes we’d get roses blooming in February. My cousins in Ontario had always been so jealous. I’d send them photos of us tanning on the deck while they were still under four feet of snow.

“Pete, you should step back.” Starshine said at my left elbow. “We still don’t know what’s out there, and the letter only said it’d be safe inside the tavern.”

“It’ll be fine,” I muttered, wiping some sweat from my eyes. “We’d see anything coming a kilometer away.”

“Unless it burrows,” Aishablue put in brightly.