Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

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Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

First edition dust jacket front cover
Written by:	Kate Beaton
Central Theme:	What Katie did to pay off her student loans, and how it changed her.
Synopsis:	A memoir in graphic novel form about working in Alberta's oilpatch in the mid-2000s.
Genre(s):	Memoir
First published:	2022

This story starts in 2005. I am twenty-one years old. This is me at twenty-one. I'm much older now, and three dimensional. —The first lines of the book.

NOTE: If you are looking for a work that you can share with your youngsters, look elsewhere.

Before Kate Beaton created Hark! A Vagrant, young Katie Beaton needed to pay off her student loans. She did what so many people in Atlantic Canada did in the 2000s (and before and since): she went west to Alberta to work in the oil industry. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is the story of what she did in Alberta.

A memoir in graphic novel form, Ducks is also an exploration of the culture of Canada's oilpatch, as seen through the eyes of a young woman who had no idea what to expect. It does not explore the oilpatch itself, except peripherally.

Katie starts out in a mining company's central "tool crib" — the storage location for consumable tools and tools that are not needed by every worker at the same time. She quickly learns that the 50:1 ratio of males to females draws quite a lot of attention to her, and the guys aren't politically correct in how they discuss the women. She loses much of her naivety during this contract.

For her second contract, she takes a job with a different mining company, at a base tool crib. She thinks that she's ready for the misogyny that she expects to find there. She isn't; while she has her own room with a lock on the door, the building itself is co-ed, and there's one page during a description of one of the workers visiting her room that's nothing but black panels because the event was so traumatic that Kate doesn't remember it. And when she tries to complain the next day, she's told to drop it.

After that contract, she takes a year away from the oilpatch to work at a museum (and on Hark! A Vagrant)... but the museum can't give her a full-time job, and she keeps getting fired from the part-time jobs she takes to make ends meet. She has no choice if she's going to pay off her student loans: Katie has to go back to the oilpatch.

She manages to get an office job at a better-run company this time... and helps her sister find a job in the same building. It's during this shift that she discovers the rampant drug problem on most of the work sites, and (in the only scene that discusses the oil sands themselves rather than the people) what mining the oilpatch is doing to the aboriginal people who live in reservations near the sands. This time, when one of her co-workers spends the night, she remembers it, but she's detached from the proceedings. She doesn't bother to complain... but she does warn her sister.

She pays off her student loan the day that she has enough money to do so, which means she needs to work in the oilpatch for a short time more to earn plane fare back home.

The story ends with a scene back in Nova Scotia, showing just how much working in the oilpatch changed Katie and the other women.

Ducks was the book that won the 2023 edition of Canada Reads, and was named as a New York Times Notable book and one of Barack Obama’s end of year favourites of 2022.

Tropes used in Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands include:

• But Liquor Is Quicker: The story with the page of black panels starts with one of the workers bringing alcohol onto the work site, which is usually "dry". Katie had lost what little tolerance for alcohol she had previously built up.
• Roman à Clef: Most of the names were changed to protect the identities of her co-workers. (Yes, even the one who spent the night with her.) The only names guaranteed to be accurate are those of her family members and the Cree elder in the scene about what mining the oilpatch is doing to the aboriginal people, all of whom she got permission to name in the book.
• Title Drop: Katie's second year in the oilpatch is the year that 1,600 ducks died on a single tailing pond; the original CBC story is shown in one of the panels.