Spoilers Ahead

Trigger Warning – Sexual Assault

In the second page of Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton, she talks about how Cape Breton used to export fish, coal, and steel; but in 2005, its main export is people. Empty chairs around tables, fathers, siblings, cousins gone to Ontario or Alberta. “The only message we got about a better future was that we had to leave home to have one. We did not question it, because this is the have-not region of a have-not province, and it has not boomed here in generations” and then a few pages later “I learn that I can have opportunity or I have a home. I cannot have both”.

The introduction hit me hard. I grew up in northern Manitoba, in an ex-mining community, population ~700. The mine shut down a few years before I was born, and the 17 years I lived there were marked with a slow exodus of people. What separates my experience from Kate Beaton’s, is that she has a love for her home, her community. She is an East Coaster, an Islander. It’s a part of her identity, and she’s proud of it, it’s her safe place. I don’t have that same reverence for northern Manitoba. I didn’t have a large family or cousins nearby, or really a tight community. I suspect part of that has to do with isolation, there was no other town around us for 100 Kms, and the next town over was another ex-mining town also in decline. The closest “boom” town was Thompson, 300Kms away.

I suspect another part of why Kate has a heritage while I do not is that Cape Breton has history. The first settlers arrived in 1605, and setting hamlets all over the island. While Kate’s hometown of Mabou is only slightly more populous than my hometown, there are hundreds of years of history in Cape Breton. People being proud of their homestead. My hometown was founded in 1950, with most of the homes in the town having been moved across over the frozen lake after a nearby mine ran dry. We didn’t have generations of history to establish ourselves, we had a single generation of transplants.

I’m getting away from the point here. What I’m trying to say is Kate’s words hit me hard. As an adult that feels without a real hometown, I get the melancholy she’s expressing here. Mine is a bit more bitter, but I can relate.

Kate chooses to move to Alberta to work in the oil sands until she can pay off her crippling student debt. She graduated from a University with an arts degree, paid for entirely by student loans. She feels like a boot has been pressed against her neck, and she’ll never be able to pay them off if she chooses to stay on Cape Breton Island, because of the lack of jobs, let alone anything well paying. With protests from her parents, she packed her bags and headed west. What follows is a deeply personal accounting of her experience working in the oil sands as a woman. Being a woman, living at camps, in a workforce that is 95% male is an experience I cannot relate to, but I can absolutely emphasize with. So many of the stories Kate tells are the derogatory comments made to and around her while she’s just trying to do her job. The constant advances, propositions, and misogyny wearing down her mental health, and that’s not even to mention how crappy working a tool shed job in -30 weather can be. The one time Kate tries to talk to a supervisor about the misogyny, she gets shut down, hard. “We’re a team here”, and “What did you expect when you came to work here?” essentially telling Kate to put up and shut up, or leave. Kate spends the next two years enduring casual toxicity, threats, invasions of privacy, gendered violence, and sexual assault.

Kate often touches upon the juxtapositions of being surrounded by people, but also being isolated. The shadow population living out two lives. Their real life back home, often with spouses and children, and the camp life, where you never really know what each other gets up two on their weekends. Drugs, sex, and relationships are all a shadowy undercurrent amongst a population of people who are in a place to do a job. The men she’s surrounded by are blue collar, apparently devoid of empathy, compassion, or respect.

After a year, she tries to leave. She gets a museum job in Victoria, B.C, but doesn’t get enough hours, so picks up a part-time job as a maid. She goes on dates, but doesn’t know how to relate to ‘normal’ people. After a year of working in Victoria, she gets the bad news that her student loans are due, and she’s not earning enough money to pay them off in Victoria. Without any better options, she makes her way back to the oil sands.

Then comes the sexual assault. In one camp, she talks about how often her door would open, someone would poke their head in and see that she was with people, mutter “wrong room”, then leave, or how often someone tries to open her door during the night, rattling the handle to see if it’s locked or not. The boys of the group mention that never happened to them. When Kate attends a party that migrates from room to room, she gets drunk, realizes she forgot her drink a few rooms back, and when she goes back to retrieve it, the man she’s with closes the door behind them and advances on her. She depicts the moment like an out-of-body experience. The scene goes dark, she floats home, then the scene changes. Later in the book she says to her friend “It felt like I had a second to decide and an eternity to live with it” This scene reminds me of Bear Town, but unlike in that fiction, Kate doesn’t get any justice. In her afterword, Kate writes, “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.” As a man, the constant awfulness that Kate endured made my skin crawl. I can only imagine that any woman reading this will be reduced to a ball of seething rage and misery.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands touches on the environmental impact of the oil sands, but the focus of the book is Kate’s story. It’s not a tragedy, but it is an unhappy tale. Rife with melancholy and bitterness. Complex feelings of being exploited, while also being party to a larger evil. Kate feels alone and weird when she’s in ‘normal’ situations, friends come and go as jobs ebb and flow. I can’t relate to the experience of being a woman in a male dominated workplace, but I absolutely have empathy for this poor woman who just wants to do her job but is constantly leered at. Even worse when she invites friends into her workplace, and they catch men ducking under the tables trying to catch a glimpse up a skirt.

Kate never invites the comments, but she’s constantly subjected to them. Her mental health takes some brutal hits. Near the end of the book, Kate comments on that while the comments and misogyny has been constant, she recognizes that there have been hundreds of men who have just been in the background. On one hand, not all men have made comments, but they do have a role in being complicit when a guy makes a shitty comment and doing nothing.

I really enjoyed this graphic novel in the same way that I enjoyed Bear Town. I sit here, angry at men. I have a deep sadness for Kate, and the world that created the situation that made Kate feel like she had to endure that, and the world that let men feel like they can behave in these ways. The author’s afterword bring a lot of context to this deeply personal story. I would not hesitate to recommend Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, but that recommendation comes with the caveat that this book can be deeply painful to anyone who has a history of sexual assault or gendered violence.