loading . . . BOOK REVIEW: Ducks **TITLE:**_**Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands**_
**AUTHOR:** **Kate Beaton**
**PUBLISHER: Drawn and Quarterly**
**DATE: 2022**
I don’t usually review graphic novels on here, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never reviewed a memoir or a work of nonfiction, but this one deserves it. I’ve been a huge fan of Kate Beaton since long before she got famous, back when she was still toiling away in the webcomic mines at Hark! A Vagrant. I’ve been thrilled to see her get so much attention for her full-length graphic novels the last few years, and none of them deserved it more than her inaugural work _Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands_. It’s a genuine masterpiece of the form, a beautifully-illustrated portrait of the stark, bitter beauty of the Alberta frontier, an exploration of how you are shaped by a culture of diaspora, at home and abroad, and a deeply personal story of leaving home and finding yourself in a new, ugly, ambiguous world of adulthood, far away from home. _Ducks_ is an indictment of the Canadian oil industry, as well as a celebration of the people who work in it, and an attempt to portray it as it was, and how she experienced it. “Everyone’s oil sands are different, and these were mine.”
**_BACKGROUND:_**
It’s a familiar story, if you listen to Canadian folk music, especially the haunting baritone of Stan Rogers. Rogers was a from a Maritime family, who had moved to Ontario to work in the factories before he was born, and in his chronicles of the life of Canada in the 1980s, he sang about the next step, as the factories closed, and people moved west in search of jobs and money and hope. “So bid farewell to the Eastern town/You never more will see/There’s self-respect and a steady cheque/In this refinery.” Graduating from college in 2005, with a heavy load of student debt and a humanities degree she didn’t know how to use, Kate Beaton found herself making the same choice, decades later, and taking a job in the booming oil sands business of Alberta. She was there for two years, 2005-2006, and then again from 2007-2008. She paid off her debts, and made enough money to start building the career she wanted, but at the cost of experiences and memories she’ll never forget. This is the story of why she went West, and what she found there.
_CONTENT WARNING: DISCUSSION OF SEXUAL ASSAULT_ _AND VIOLENCE_
**_WHAT I LIKED:_**
1. One of the dominant themes of _Ducks_ is what Beaton calls a “culture of diaspora”, a sense that she was always destined to be “another empty chair around the table”. Beaton comes from Cape Breton Island, in Nova Scotia, an absolutely gorgeous place (I’ve been!) that has been suffering from an economic downturn for over a century now. Beaton’s grandfather went west on the harvest train, her aunts went to Detroit to work in the automobile factories, and every family has the same stories.
> I need to tell you this—there is no knowing Cape Breton Island without knowing how deeply ingrained two diametrically opposite experiences are: A deep love for home, and the knowledge of how frequently we have to leave it to find work somewhere else. This push and pull defines us. It’s all over our music, our literature, our art, and our understanding of our place in the world. To “Have-Not” is a mental state, as well as an economic one.
>
> Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Kate Beaton, pg. 11
When Beaton was young, it was the oil boom in Alberta that was drawing young men (and some young women) away from home, and she talks about how this shaped her upbringing, her education, everything, long before she made any kind of conscious choice to join them. Again, it’s not a new story: “In the taverns of Edmonton, fishermen shout/’Haul it away! Haul it away!’/They left three hundred years buried up by the Bay/Where the whales make free in the harbour.” But Beaton strips away the patina of romanticism, and gives it to us unadorned and raw, in a guise that we can all recognize: The daughter of a middle-class family who saved up to send her to college, who has dreams of a career in museums or anthropology, and just can’t figure out a way to make that work.
2. We see the inverse of this when she gets to Fort McMurray too. In the same way that life in Nova Scotia was shaped by the memories of those who’d gone, and the dreams of following them, the communities of workers in Alberta are still shaped by their exodus from home, and the ties forged there. She spends her first Thanksgiving out west visiting an old family friend who’d moved to Alberta before she was born, and she gets her first big camp job when a patron at the bar she works at recognizes her accent as being from a neighboring town and recommends her to his boss. Distinctions of province, of age, of generation, of trade, of gender, they all end up being vitally important in shaping the contours of the deracinated community of the oil camps.
3. Kate Beaton’s big break comes when she gets assigned to the camp at Long Lake, outside the city, which means higher pay and no rent expenses. But it also means living on-site, in a place that it is a veritable hothouse. Taking the taxi, her driver warns her: “You live here. They don’t. Do you know how people treat a place were they don’t live? Fort McMurray is a town. I have young children there. People say bad things about Fort McMurray. But it is the crazy men in the camps.” (_Ducks_ , 142). The oil sand camps are filled with thousands of young men–fifty to every single woman. They are lonely, homesick, freezing cold, horny, exhausted, bored, sick with cabin fever, and have more money than they’ve ever had in their lives before. It’s a liminal space, a “shadow city”, where nothing seems to matter, and where consequences can be ignored by companies desperate to avoid “lost-time incidents” above all else. Drug abuse and alcoholism is rampant, work accidents are common despite the comically graphic public safety announcements that everyone has to sit through, everybody knows that the air they breathe is cancerous, and Beaton does not shy away from depicting the inevitable realities of what this means for the workers living there.
> This doesn’t mean I am not deeply and negatively affected by it. I will always be affected by it. But I guarantee you that neither of the men who raped me consider what they did to be rape, if they consider it at all. I know the name of one of them; he is a father now with a woman who was his girlfriend when he raped me. I was nothing in his life but a short release from the boredom and loneliness endemic in camp life, but he was a major trauma in mine.
>
> Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Kate Beaton, _“Afterword”_
This is the price that everybody paid; for jobs and income and opportunities and cheap energy, and Beaton doesn’t let you avoid it. Neither does she let it be sensationalized. It was, as she reminds us repeatedly, routine, an inevitable byproduct of the industry, and one that too many Canadians were happy to ignore. In _Ducks_ , Beaton provides few answers, but also doesn’t allow you to ignore the questions. It is unflinching in its depiction of the actions of the people there, and how it impacted her and other communities, while also being deeply sympathetic to the workers trying to make a life for themselves, often after their lifelong trades had collapsed out from under them.
4. The intelligentsia is having something of an anti-feminist backlash at the moment, driven I suspect, by the supposed “vindication” of the 2024 election. At a time when the overgrown children of the punditocracy–men who have never worked a real job in their lives–gleefully debate the “feminization” of the workplace, it is a relief to have a book that tackles the questions of labor and gender from a deeply practical perspective, by someone who has actually worked in the oil industry, unlike certain podcasters I could name.
5. The title of the book comes from an incident that occurred while Beaton was working, where over a thousand migrating ducks are killed by the pollution in one of the tailing ponds. This becomes another recurrent theme in Ducks, as she slowly becomes more aware of the catastrophic environmental impact the oil industry is having on Alberta, and especially the Albertan First Nations. In an especially impactful scene, Beaton transcribes and illustrates (with permission) a YouTube video from Celina Harpe, a Cree elder an activist, that Beaton describes as being incredibly eye-opening for her when she first watched it in 2008. It’s one of the many contradictions the book illustrates, in which opportunity for some can be utterly devastating for others caught up in its wake.
6. If, like me, you’ve followed Kate Beaton for her webcomic work for years, you mostly know her for ability to draw cute little comics about history and literature. Which she’s great at! But _Ducks_ is a stunning demonstration that her artistic abilities are far more expansive than that. One of the things that I just could not stop thinking about is the way she creates these vivid images of the Alberta oil fields as this alien landscape—acres and acres of machinery and engines and industrial equipment, endless clouds of smoke and smog, trucks the size of houses roaring by, the permafrost bouncing beneath their wheels, all in the midst of this frozen wilderness that seems to stretch forever, with the aurora borealis burning overhead—illustrated by these gorgeously-detailed schematics of the camps she worked at. It’s terrifying and beautiful all at once, and it puts everything into perspective. It really makes you feel like you’ve been transported to another planet.
7. _Ducks_ has a very abrupt ending, with her returning home to Nova Scotia after paying off her debts, and grappling with how her experiences changed her–illustrated by a chance encounter with an old coworker on a Halifax street. But that’s appropriate, because the whole book is deeply ambiguous. It’s honest in what it portrays, but rarely a morality tale with a simple narrative or obvious solution. It is, after all, a memoir, an account of three years of Beaton’s life, and real life rarely obeys the laws of fiction. She’s trying to tell you her own story, and to give a glimpse of the other stories she saw unfolding in Northern Alberta, but there’s not always an obvious answer, or a clear moral. The struggle with complicity and guilt, and how to balance those with the demands of daily life, is another theme, and again, there’s not necessarily a clear answer.
8. _Ducks_ was published in 2022, and is about events that took place over a decade before that, but it remains extremely relevant. This year has seen a resurgence of interest in the Alberta Separatist Movement, driven in large part by the perception that the oil industry is under attack by outside interests. It is interesting to read Kate Beaton’s melancholy, grim exploration of her time in the oil sands, and realize that she is talking about the Golden Age that Premier Danielle Smith wants to reclaim.
**_WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE:_**
1. I don’t know, the hardcover was pretty expensive? Worth it though.
**_WILL YOU LIKE IT:_**
I really do think _Ducks_ is a masterpiece of the form. It’s a brilliant, astute memoir that sheds a light on a complex topic and time that remains highly relevant today. It’s deeply personal and heartfelt, while also opening up this very specific chapter of recent history to examination and understanding. It makes you think about stuff you’ve never thought of before, while never necessarily giving you answers, and it paints an intimate, painful, and sometimes hilarious portrait of Kate Beaton’s own life, in a way that makes me appreciate her other work even more. Barack Obama said you should read it, and who am I to argue with him? I would firmly recommend it to anyone who’s enjoyed Beaton’s earlier work, or who likes graphic novels in general, or who is interested in contemporary biography, or the Canadian oil industry of the early 2000s, or the Maritime Canadian diaspora, or who just wants to read a good story. You don’t have to know anything about any of these topics going in, and I think you’ll learn a lot, and enjoy doing so. Give it a try.
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### _Related_ https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/2025/11/10/book-review-ducks/
