Gabrielle's Reviews > Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

I have been a fan of Kate Beaton’s work for a long time: her brand of literary references and weird humor is right up my alley, and one of her comic strips still makes me laugh until I cry every time I look at it. But “Ducks” is very, very different. It is autobiographical, nuanced, often upsetting and challenging – and explores a Canadian reality a lot of us are not sufficiently familiar with.

Katie studied the subject she was passionate about in university. Unfortunately, that doesn’t guarantee employment anymore, and the reality of her student debts was a heavy weight on her shoulder. So she did what a lot of Canadians from small, struggling regions end up doing: she packed her bags and went to work for oil companies in Fort McMurray, Alberta. The camps are isolated, the work is hard, the ratio of men to women employed there is essentially 50 to 1, and few people have the level of wit and education Katie brings along with her. This setting alone prepares the reader for some of the things Katie experiences during her two years of working at various camps in the oil sands region, but not for every moment she decides to explore. Of course, there is sexism, harassment, sexually threatening environments – but there is also concern for the mental health of everyone working in such a pressure cooker of a place. A lot of room is also given to the struggle of reconciling the idea of working for an industry that causes environmental and social damage on a huge scale, whilst knowing that your other options are even worst jobs that imply you will struggle financially for the rest of your life and never be able to give your family the means by which to get out of generational poverty.

One of the crucial things Katie wonders about is: is it the place that makes good people behave badly, or were they always bad and just better at not showing it in environment where their behaviors and words would not have been accepted. This is an important question, and deserves to be chewed on thoughtfully. The culture of toxic masculinity she experiences certainly hurts her and her female colleagues in many ways, but it also hurts the men who succumb to the pressure to behave in certain ways. This in no way excuses their words or actions, but it must be acknowledged.

I was terribly saddened by a few pages early on, where she is told that being young and pretty, she will have her pick of the men on site, which she shows no interest in – and her understanding that when some of the men there show interest in her, they are not interested in her because they like her specifically, but just because she is a girl who happens to be there. This is an incredibly lonely position to find oneself in at that age, an age at which popular wisdom said you should be meeting people, dating and having fun…

It isn’t all doom and gloom, and Katie forges beautiful friendships and share wonderful moments along the way, but the reality of that type of work is a strange and heavy weight – I am sad to say that big city slickers like me know very little about this topic: we are taught to be firmly against it because of it’s environmental impact and the way big oil has mistreated the Indigenous communities who were located there, but most of us have never spoken to someone who worked there, in the isolation, harsh weather and working conditions.

This book was beautiful, harrowing, moving and educational all at once, and it is an absolute masterclass on what can be done with the graphic novel format. An absolute must-read.



*It must be noted that this was a birthday present from my dad, who is famous for buying me books I end up wanting to chuck in the shredder. This year, he actually paid attention to the wish list and said that this book looked so interesting he got himself a copy, too! Thank you, dad!