Kate Beaton

This volume starts when Kate Beaton is 21. She's just graduated from university and has student loans to pay off. She's from Cape Breton, an area of Canada without a lot in the way of jobs. Faced with student loans and a family that isn't well off enough to give her a safety net, Beaton opts to do what so many around her have done and get a job in the oil sands. She figures she'll work there for a few years, pay off her student loans, and then get a (less well paying) job she genuinely loves using her degree.

One of the first places she ends up at is Syncrude. She works as a tool crib attendant, learning how to do her job, watching the first of many safety videos, and getting to know the people. As is the case at every location she ends up at, she's one of a very small number of women working there, and painfully aware that all the men are looking at her. It's an odd, uncomfortable, and artificial environment. She knows that the loneliness and isolation of the oil sands contributes to it - any one of the people she grew up around could become just like one of the guys at these sites. It's not a great situation, and she knows it, but there isn't much she can do about it. If she complains, she's either ignored or viewed as troublemaker who can't work with the team.

As the volume progresses, she meets lots of different people - some decent, some not so much - and gets to know the complexities of the oil sands. Mental health issues and drugs are a huge issue among the workers but never talked about, unless a workplace injury makes it impossible to ignore, and even then the root of the problem is never addressed. The same goes for gendered violence. While the workers are doing what they can to get by, the oil companies they work for are damaging the environment, which in turn affects the indigenous people who live in the area.

Although she doesn't say so directly, in her afterword Beaton mentions her sister's cancer diagnosis and eventual death, and I couldn't help but wonder if her time at the oil sands is what eventually led to her cancer. There are multiple mentions, throughout the volume, of things like the cough and weird rash that a lot of the workers get, even those who primarily work in offices.

This took a while to grow on me, but by the end it was tough reading. The rapes were chilling, despite nothing much being shown on-page, just Beaton mentally "going away" for a bit. I wanted her to keep her museum job for longer (she looked so happy). I had a little blip of happiness when I recognized that period of time she started her webcomic, but mixed in with everything else, it just became sadness.

Extras:

A 3-page afterword by the author.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)… (more)

I remember reading Kate Beaton's 'Ducks' back in 2014 when it was just a series of sketch comics on her "Hark a Vagrant" website. A lot of those stories made it into this book verbatim, which is good because I loved those comics.

This is not your typical Kate Beaton book. It's still smart and occasionally funny, but it's also very grounded in the mundane. None of her usual whimsy is to be found here. Even so, Beaton has proven herself to be an excellent storyteller with heavy subject matters.

Beaton does an amazing job humanizing her colleagues from the oil sands of northern Alberta, even the ones she doesn't seem to recall that fondly. She's empathetic enough to understand that even the surliest laborer is a distinct individual with their own inner life. It's this same empathy that makes this book a heavy read. Beaton has no shortage of sad or traumatic stories about her time spent working the oil sands. Stories about the long-term effects living an isolated life with little to do has on a person. The oil industry doesn't just remove value from the Earth for profit, it does the same for the humans who work for it.

There's a lot going on in this book, but the one overarching theme that unites everything is the incredible ability humans have to compartmentalize literally anything and keep moving forward. Environmental destruction, exploitative labor practices, harassment, drug addiction, sexual assault, & workplace fatalities are all things that occur within the pages of this book, and the people affected by these events are able to be file them away to be dealt with at some other time. Or not at all. "That's just how things are here!" is a common response for tragedies both large and small. Humanity's superhuman ability to persevere through tragedy can be easily commodified to tolerate abuse.

I don't think this is a book for everyone, it is challenging & sobering, but it is very good. Kate Beaton is a longtime favorite of mine, and I'm glad to finally see those sketch comic PNGs become a full fledged book.… (more)