Rural Crime Watch Area; Or, A Vacation Post for 2025

 

In a perfect world this would be a substantive post, as I left on my summer bike  trip last Wednesday and arrived home yesterday. On the other hand, I'm owned one short, breezy, on-the-road post. Owed, man. 

Anyway, my Dad died the winter before last of the slow and fading road to the west that my uncle is now following, removing the need to ride the Crowsnest to Grand Forks for my annual visit. I also accomplished my goal of riding (part) of the Okanagan last year, and was free to return to Highway 5A, "The  Old Princeton-Kamloops Highway," which I last rode, in part, as a youth so many years ago, full of all the silly follies of youth that seem so absurd when you are possessed of the follies of old age. 

Suffice it to say that the section up the Nicola Valley from Merritt Kamloops is as beautiful a ride through one of B.C.'s minor vacation paradises as I remember. At least until the road abruptly switches to climbing a ridge up to the chunk of the Okanagan Plateau behind Kamloops along which my sister lives. While I would have had to make that climb to reach my destination somehow, in a perfect world the grade would have been a bit less taxing. 

The Princeton-Merritt section, it turns out, is the evil twin of the two legs. I vaguely recall the controversy about building the Okaganan Connector (Highway 97C on the map) back in the Nineties, and now have an intellectual appreciation of the difficulties of building a modern road up Hamilton Hill, from having descended it at a great clip last Saturday. The flip side, the gain of that altitude (and more to spare) on the road from Princeton to Merritt, is another matter. Wikipedia delicately describes it as a 63km journey through "undeveloped land," and it is in the middle of it tht I saw the twin of the striking RCMP Rural Crime Watch sign that I lifted from the Internet above, from a Calgary Herald article in which the Asper press takes a break from extolling all things reactionary and presumably rural to note that we have a problem here. No doubt it will turn out to be related to the Rez, the natives, and non-Whiteness over in Alberta, but no such excuses here in BC. The Okanagan Band was never a big fan of this upper country, coming up in the summer to mine ochre and hunt, but living down in the flats in the winter, where they have made their permanent homes in more modern times. (Leaving behind at some old mining towns, to be sure, persons of First Nations descent who did not want to be involved in the Band.) Today the crime is all ranchers behaving badly, and the crimes we are to watch out for are poaching, rustling, and dumping. 

In 2024, a paper by Giacomo Fontana and Wieke de Neef (pictured shredding a particularly difficult ascent) hit the big times, with publication in Antiquity, and, in pirated form, Academia.edu: "Italy's empty hillforts: reassessing urban-centric biases through combined non-invasive prospection methods on a Samnite site (fourth–third centuries BC)." Reinterpreting the hundreds of Late Bronze Age/Iron Age hillforts that dot Italy's Apennines on the strength of site surveys and talking to the locals, Fontana and de Neef reject the traditional "proto-town" interpretation, and emphasis on "monumentality" in favour of "activities connected with animal husbandry." Monte Santa Croce-Cognolo, twelve km from Capua on a saddle pass between the valley of the Volturno and the flats of the Campania, happens to be clear of heavy underbrush, due to regular grazing, and therefore suitable for site survey. With an 11 ha plateau just below, proximity to fertile soils, and a strategic location, it has long been singled out as the acropolis of a hypothesised lower town, of which no evidence had been found up to the point of the survey. (One is reminded of more than one hypothesised lower town around the Mediterranean world.) 

It turns out that, in fact, there was a single wall enclosing the entire area, much of it a single wall without a rampart. A wide gate, lost in recent times, points to the nearby village, established in medieval times but possibly on an earlier foundation. Locals report that, up until 70 years, ago, the site was used for year-round pasturing of the village's sheep and pigs and seasonal pasturing of turkeys. Only in particularly warm years were the animals brought down to the fields.  "Interpretations focusing on livestock and pastoral economy are largely neglected by the urban-centric perspective that has guided research on Samnite hillforts."

Hmm. Why would the ancient Samnites graze their livestock in lightly fortified and remote upland pastures? HMM? Did they have something to protect?

(The Dioscuri are one of those ancient cults that were clearly hugely important to the Ancients but difficult to integrate into the mythography, like Nyx, or the Kabeiroi, . It's almost like they lost the plot in high Antiquity. Though stories of cattle raiding, horse racing, and woman-stealing do survive. Rural crime!)