Ducks

 

Ducks
Two Years in the Oil Sands

Drawn & Quarterly

2022

 

 

Ducks is a graphic memoir by Kate Beaton, author of the Hark! A Vagrant webcomics. I absolutely love her silly little comics, poking gentle fun at history and literature. I believe she's also written a pair of children's books about kings and ponies. So a 400 page memoir about the time she spent working in the Canadian oil industry to pay off her student loans is something of a departure from the work she's most famous for. It is depressing and bleak, and a work of unreciprocated empathy for the men who work there full-time. And it is a masterpiece, a thoughtful and mature work by an artist at the top of her form.

 

At first glance, Ducks resembles Beaton's other projects. The character drawings have her signature look, and she paces her storytelling so that each page or 2-page spread contains a single complete vignette. But this is a different sort of story. Beaton catalogs her personal experiences, but she also examines the economic and geographic inequalities that send so many people like her, from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia in the east, over to dangerous and demanding (but well-paid) blue collar jobs in Alberta in the west.

 

Beaton also looks at the gender inequality that structures the experiences of women working in these labor camps, where they are outnumbered 50-to-1, and where whatever fraction of the men engage in sexual harassment (half? less?) are numerous enough that she is stared at, propositioned, and verbally harassed all day every day; numerous enough that men pop into her room whenever her door is unlocked, and her door-handle rattles in the night as they check to see if they can get in under cover of dark; that she is assaulted more than once by men who suffer no consequences for their actions. 

 

Other reviews mention the harassment, but to my mind, it is the thing this book is about, even as she addresses other topics. She remembers incident after incident, recounts anecdote after anecdote. Across the 400-pages, most of them show her being harassed, or show her trying to process and understand it.

 

Katie has just finished college, and wants to try to become a professional artist, but thinks that to do that, she needs to pay off her student loans so she'll have the financial room to take risks. Everyone in Nova Scotia grows up knowing of relatives who went west, where the jobs are, to provide for their families, and so she decides to do the same. 

 

Katie gets advised to try for a job in the tool crib, where she will check out and receive back equipment from the people working in the field, and she manages to get hired for a spot. Initially she also waitresses in town to help cover the costs of her travel and rent. The harassment at work is immediate, overwhelming, bewildering, and when she tries to ask some of the older women about it, they tell her it's a compliment, tell her to toughen up, try to set her up on dates with some of the younger men.

 

There are plenty of men who are polite to her, who show surprising kindness when she needs it most, like working a shift on Christmas. There are men who are her friends. But day in and day out, her most common experience with men is them sexually harassing her.

 

Katie moves to a new company to make more money, faster. She's going to be living onsite at a work camp, where her lodging and meals will be free. The men there are lonelier, more desperate, more willing to violate her boundaries. 

 

Katie starts to help her older sister and one of her college friends get jobs in the admin office. She's insistent that they not work exposed in the tool crib, like she does. Between then and when they arrive, she is sexually assaulted, twice, at weekend parties. She becomes understandably depressed and anxious. She blames herself, and feels responsible for what she's bringing her sister and friend into.

 

After the other two arrive, Katie's not alone, and she feels better for awhile. Her sister confronts her about her depression, and she tells her what happened. She takes a break to work at a museum, but can't afford both rent and her loan payments, and so returns, this time to an office job too. In the office, she is more insulated from the harassment, although it never really stops. She has space to think, and tells her friend what happened too.

 

While Katie is working in the office, another company, the first one she worked for, is responsible for a major spill that kills thousands of ducks. The incident that radicalizes her more is seeing a video of a First Nations woman talking about how the oil industry is operating on, polluting, ruining her people's land, and making her people sick. Katie realizes that she has participated in this harm, a fact that Beaton also grapples with in the author's note at the end.

 

Later Katie and her friend begin trying to tell their stories of being harassed. Many are unsympathetic. Others seem quick to want salacious detail, and to demonize the men. Katie refuses to speak to a reporter like that - she blames the working conditions and the companies who create them, and thinks that middle-class men from the city would act the same if put in the same environment. She doesn't want to hurt men like her dad, cousins, uncles, by helping to stereotype them based on region, ruralness, and social class. Nor does she want to defame the many men who've been kind to her here. As Katie's friend tells her, it's a shame her empathy for the men isn't reciprocated in their behavior toward her.

 

Eventually, Katie pays off her loans and returns home immediately, moving back in with her parents with no more debt, but also nothing in the bank.

 

Throughout the work, we see Katie and others comment on all the dust they're breathing, the chemicals they're exposed to. We see them worry about the long-term effects. In the author's note at the end, we learn that someone who appears prominently in the story got cancer around the time Beaton began writing this book, and died young before it was published.

 

One of Katie's, and I suppose Beaton's, preoccupations throughout the book is the question of why so many of the men act the way they do. Katie does not want to be flirted with by people who she wouldn't like back home, people who wouldn't like her back at their home, if she weren't one of the only women they ever see, people who she thinks really don't like her, but are just bored and desperately lonely, and want to use her as a means to an end. Unlike Katie, most of the workers, men and women alike aren't there for just a few years. The question of who you are at work versus who you are back home becomes more complex when home becomes a place you only get to visit, and work becomes the place you live.