Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

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 show more 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. show less

This was really good. I can see why people have loved this. It’s a thoughtful and many-dimensioned look at the ethics of working in the oil sands, of working as a woman in a male-dominated place, of what isolation for work can do to people—any people—who are put in that situation. It was very moving, and Beaton’s ability to create a lot of emotion with her clear, efficient style was truly impressive. I can understand why the wait list for this was so long at the library.

I'm so grateful that people pursue art as a career, that some even went to university for it, even when it so often devalued and overpriced. I'm so glad that Kate Beaton got big enough that she was able to tell this part of her life. This book was a great reminder to me of why I enjoy reading, because I'm fascinated by all the different paths people can take because I can only take one myself.

I think graphic novels have established themselves well enough now as a part of Serious Literature. Even then, this novel still philosophised and delved so much deeper than I expected into the themes of identity and how fragile our sense of self can be.

As already a fan of Beaton's drawings and humour, this was right up alley while also expanding show more what I thought I knew or could assume about her. If you're not a fan yet, then please go through her webcomics first and then once you're an inevitable fan, get onto Ducks. show less

After college, Katie Beaton left Mabou to find work in the oil sands of Alberta, in Fort McMurray, in order to pay off her student loans. In the camps, men outnumber women about fifty to one, and harassment is rampant, with no real recourse. Katie learns on the job, and moving from one camp to another, forms bonds with others. After being raped, she leaves for Victoria, British Columbia, to work in a maritime museum, but returns to the camps to earn the rest of the money she needs to pay off her student loans and eventually return home to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Katie's time changes her, as she ponders the peculiar environment of the camps - the isolation, depression, and drug abuse, as well as the impact on the environment and the show more Indigenous people whose home is being irreparably damaged.

Often bleak, occasionally funny, always thoughtful.

See also: Hey Kiddo by Jarrett J. Krosoczka, Stitches by David Smalls

Quotes

"All you need here is to be a woman. You stick out, and that's all it takes...and someone thinks they like you. But that doesn't make me feel good! That makes me feel like I'm not even a person!" (Katie, 70)

"Do you know how people treat a place where they don't live?" (Somali cab driver, 142)

"Do you think people are different at home than they are here? ...Then, are they different forever? ...People do things here they wouldn't do at home. But is that who they really are? Or are they who they are at home?" (Katie, 201)

"Do you think this place makes people better or worse?" (Katie, 224)
"Nobody likes it here. Everyone wishes they were somewhere else." (225)

"Well, I'm sure that was fucking weird for everyone! Back to work." (Ryan, 309)

"It felt like I had a second to decide, and an eternity to live with it." (Katie, 381) show less

One of the best graphic novels I've ever read, an incredibly impactful story made all the better by Beaton's incredible command of the comic panel format. Her dialogue is interesting, but so realistic that it makes every page flow like water. Some pictures of banal objects, or beauty against the backdrop of the harsh oil sands camps are staggering.

I feel a personal connection to this one - Beaton went to Mount Allison the same time I did, I remember reading her comics in the student newspaper (The Argosy) all the time. I forget if we met, or spoke but I certainly got a taste of the language and culture of the east coast with my time in New Brunswick. Seeing some very familiar names and slang rushed me back to a very important, show more unforgettable time in my life. To boot, she spent a year in Victoria - my hometown!

The content of the story is heartbreaking and difficult, to say the least. I think what I'm most impressed with is that she doesn't paint any broad strokes about the kind of people that suffer isolation, mental fatigue and physical risks that come with working in the oil sands. She doesn't excuse their bad behavior, nor does she give any easy answers. The reasons as to why people move out there to work, particularly her fellow Maritimers, are both simple and complex. The theme is as old as time, but feels fresh here. She doesn't pull any punches and my heart goes out to her and anybody who had to suffer like her, and many women, did and do on a daily basis.

I write this a week after my high school classmate was murdered by her estranged husband. I feel angry and helpless - I don't know what to do, say or even how to feel. So I might be vulnerable because of this emotional mindset I'm in, but it certainly made Ducks hit harder because of it.

Brilliant book, deserving of all the rewards it received. I hope Beaton keeps writing and drawing for many years. show less

Kate Beaton is from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, which has been suffering from an economic depression since the collapse of the fishing and coal industries a generation ago. Upon graduating from college with large student loans, Kate followed in the footsteps of many of her neighbors and joined the oil industry in Alberta, which promised more cash in a short amount of time than she could ever hope to make at home. For two years she moved around between different mining sites, working in a tool shed here and an office there. The isolation, belittlement, and sexual harassment were near constant, and if she tried to do something about it she was chastised for causing problems. Most of all, she bore witness to what this life does to men like show more her family and neighbors - poor men who leave their family behind for months or years and become hard and mean and get hit by trucks or maimed by machinery, all while destroying the environment.

This book is the definition of a magnum opus. Over 400 pages of hand-drawn grayscale comics detailing how she ended up in the oil sands and the complicated people she met there. The drawings of people are simple, in Beaton’s style, but interspersed are stunning illustrations of oil pumping equipment, landscapes, and wildlife. It’s a story that could never be told in any other format. show less

***SPOILERS HIDDEN***

In 2005 cartoonist Kate Beaton found herself in a dilemma as a recent college graduate with large student loans to pay off. Her double degree in history and anthropology wasn’t opening doors career-wise, so she headed to Alberta, Canada, to work in the oil sands, a job that paid handsomely. Ducks is a sequential-art memoir about her two years working there.

Extremely male-dominated—roughly fifty men to every one woman—oil sands are far from ideal workplaces for women, especially for a young woman making this her first job out of college. This memoir is 450 pages, and stunningly, the majority of it is a chronicling of constant sexual harassment and more: Beaton was raped on two different occasions. It appears show more that not a day went by without some kind of harassment, whether that be quiet leering, objectifying comments to Beaton herself, or objectifying and misogynistic comments about women in general—yet Beaton soldiered her way through what would, understandably, break many people. It was a soul-crushing existence, and her fortitude, and work ethic, stand out as much as the outrageous depictions of harassment.

She wasn’t a robot, though. The panels portraying her rapes show her in a dissociated state during and hollowed out afterward. Making matters worse was that she had no recourse. Complaining would not only change nothing but could mean consequences for her, and she couldn’t afford to have the job get any worse than it already was, or to lose it altogether. In moments of introspection, Beaton pondered her dilemma and went further to examine how loneliness, isolation, and boredom can bring out another side of a person. She struggled with the reality that most of the men toiling away at this job were husbands, boyfriends, and dads, yet in addition to the sexual harassment and assault, cheating was a way of life at the work camps, expected and even encouraged. She never used the term “toxic masculinity,” but her memoir shows that the oil sands are the very embodiment of the mindset and behavior. In an environment so rough and intimidating, any man who didn’t follow the “male code” would be swiftly mocked and ostracized. She and her sister, who eventually joined her as a co-worker, wondered whether their own loving father could change for the worse if put in such an environment. Is anyone immune?:

"The worst part for me about being harassed here isn’t that people say shitty things. It’s when they say them and they sound like me, in the accent that I dropped when I went to university. That they look like my cousins and uncle, you know, even though they’re from all over the country…that they are familiar. And that this place creates that where it didn’t exist before. This place. It’s not an excuse, it’s just…The worst thing is that your heart breaks."

But Beaton also acknowledged that many men ignored her (not that they weren’t harassing anyone, cheating, or both, however); it’s just that the abusive men so dominated her life that it was easy to forget about the ones who didn’t abuse her.

She also made the best of her situation. She was friendly with many of the (better) men she worked with. All the while, some of these men addressed her as “Doll” and variations on that, but she let it pass. The impression isn’t that she approved of such belittling monikers, just that she recognized the limits of her miserable situation: Complaining wouldn’t be good for her, and her paycheck would. Ducks is Beaton’s reclaiming of some of the power she lost when she was forced to shut up to get what she needed.

People shouldn’t read this book if they can’t tolerate depictions of men behaving at their worst around women. The memoir is basically a series of these incidents. It doesn’t tell a story, and chronology is nonexistent, but that disorganization works somewhat to show that every day was the same—both the soulless, ugly work setting and the atrocious behavior:

" . . . work camps are a uniquely capsuled-off society, a liminal space, and analogue for so many other male-dominated spaces. Gendered violence does happen when men outnumber women by as much as fifty to one, as they can in the camps or [at] work sites. Of course it does. Of course this happens when men are in isolation for long stretches of time, away from their families and relationships and communities, and completely resocialized in a camp and work environment like that of the oil sands."

That’s recognition of a disturbing reality, not an excuse. Beaton’s memoir won’t allow dysfunction to be swept under the rug. show less