“I’m the most hated man in town,” Ray McKelvie told me. The town in question was Clinton, British Columbia, approximately 350 kilometres northeast of Vancouver, on Highway 97. Later, I asked another Clinton resident whether McKelvie’s claim was true. She thought for a moment. “Well, there’s Joe, who lives in the trailer park,” she said. “We don’t like him much either. But it’s about even.” McKelvie and I were sitting in the North Road Trading Post, the antique store McKelvie ran in a converted gas station at the north end of town. The garage and lot were dotted with rusty vehicles, some...