kate beaton ducks two years in the oil sands

Cape Breton has been home for the Beatons for generations, and it is hard for her to imagine leaving. After university, she lived with her family in Cape Breton, the Nova Scotia island known for its wild landscape and sweeping coastal views.

T he book opens in 2005, when Beaton is twenty-one years old and freshly graduated with a bachelor of arts, paid for with student loans, from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Life of an Artist.

Using stark, sprawling illustrations and casual dialogue, she reflects-as one of very few women in work sites dominated by men-on the loneliness, trauma, and sometimes violence that can accompany making a living. Though environmental impact is a big part of the story, the unspoken personal cost of this kind of labour is at its heart, with Beaton drawing parallels between the destruction of the land and its workers.

In her latest book, she writes about her time with some of the world’s largest oil companies. The memoir is a departure for Beaton, the celebrated cartoonist known for the whip-smart humour of her series Hark! A Vagrant, which she began to draw during her off-hours in the province. In Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Beaton includes these tragedies to highlight an often-ignored part of Alberta’s oil industry: the lived experiences of its workers. I could be him,” she tells a co-worker while poring over a CBC article. She immediately knows the papers are wrong: the man was from Cape Breton Island, as is she. News reports misidentify him as a “Calgary man,” but Beaton recognizes his name as one from down home. Not long after the safety meeting, another man dies while driving on a notoriously dangerous stretch of highway linking the oil sands north of Fort McMurray. The birds certainly garner more attention from the public: the New York Times covers the story, and by the end of that year, more than a thousand ducks perish at the nearby pond. The staff are more preoccupied with a group of ducks that got stuck in nearby tailings ponds-the toxic sludge that results from the oil-extraction process-and the steps they need to take to avoid it happening at their facility.

But the death feels like a footnote at the gathering, and despite a few murmurs, it is shrugged off by those present. The worker suffered a heart attack and threw himself out of a crane to avoid accidentally landing on the controls and hurting those around it. Then, the staff learn that one of their peers has died. He rattles off a warning about appropriate PPE. “Okay boys-couple notices here,” the man leading the meeting says. She is far from home, as are most of her co-workers people have come to the mines from across Canada and beyond its borders. It’s April 2008, and Beaton has been working in the Alberta oil sands for over a year. O ne of the most memorable scenes from Kate Beaton’s new graphic memoir happens at a routine safety meeting.

Kate beaton ducks two years in the oil sands