ducks two years in the oil sands kate beaton

On her way to a better paying job at an OPTI-Nexen camp, where workers stay 24/7, Kate’s Somali taxi driver tells her: “You be careful, young girl. So the have-nots of Canada go to the sands, where none of them really live. “You’re here and you make money.” It is not a nice place to work. “What kind of question is that?” he responds. nice place to work?” Kate asks a boss early on. Bitumen extraction is laborious, environmentally devastating, and, especially in 2005-2008 when the book is set, extremely profitable. Oil sands, or tar sands, are sand and rock containing bitumen, a dense form of crude oil. The old jobs are gone - coal mines and steel plants shut, the Grand Banks irreparably depleted by overfishing. They share similar accents and familiar names and a deep love of home.

They are from Newfoundland (“accordions and codfish”) and Cape Breton (“fiddles and lobster'). A lot of her coworkers come from there too. Beaton is from the island of Cape Breton, in Nova Scotia, on the Canadian east coast. In Ducks we see that most of the people who work in the oil sands of landlocked northern Alberta are from somewhere else. The DJ announces 'That was 'Where Have All the Little Boats Gone?' by Eddie Coffey from his album Come Closer, East Coaster. 'Everyone is sitting in their trucks.” He turns on the radio. “It’s the Newfoundland Radio Hour,” a coworker in a hardhat and work gloves explains. Inside is all industrial shelving filled with tools and equipment. Outside is the jagged architecture of Syncrude Canada Ltd.'s base mine. In an early scene in Ducks, Kate is working at the tool crib in western Canada’s oil sands. It’s an autobiographical and sociological masterpiece, and I would like to talk about it.

It’s 436 dense pages, drawn simply and impeccably. That was where I was at when Ducks came out. My grasp on what it is we’re supposedly doing here with this ‘comics’ thing has gotten distressingly tenuous. The internet, which once felt like a thrilling refuge (I was 24), is now a firehose of content impossible to parse (I am 39). For one, the world feels more fucked than it ever has before. Over the 15 years Kate and I have been industry friends, things have changed a lot. We made friends, another one of those weird internet friendships that feels both intangible and invaluable. Like everyone else in the world I became a fan of her work - the funny historical stuff and the (also funny, but serious too) autobio stuff. Kate Beaton and I are the same age, and we hit the indy comics scene at roughly the same time.

Ducks two years in the oil sands kate beaton