December 8, 2022
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, by Kate Beaton
In October I went to see Kate Beaton present her graphic memoir Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the force of that presentation kind of made the book itself beside the point, hence the reason I’m posting about it two months later, but it’s still on my mind.
Before Kate Beaton made a name for herself drawing ridiculously clever comics inspired by classic literature and history, she was an arts grad from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, with student loans to pay off and little opportunity for lucrative employment, and certainly not anywhere near her home, from which people have been leaving to find work since even before the coal mining industry went bust. In her AGO presentation (the most riveting, hilarious, generous, and vulnerable author talk I’ve ever been to, complete with music and singing), Beaton talked about her grandfather travelling to the prairies to find work as a farmhand, decades before her own journey west. She talked about what it does to a place to be robbed of its people and connections, and what it does to a self to belong to a place where you’re taught that a future isn’t possible.
In the early 2000s, Beaton moved to Alberta for well-paid work in the oil sands, and it was a strange and lonely existence rife with contradictions, which she captures beautifully in Ducks. Lonely and never alone, out of place but surrounded by people she recognizes as like those from home, earning money but nothing to spend it on, small in an immense awe-inspiring landscape being desecrated by industry.
Beaton’s drawings are composed in shades of grey, which is fitting for a story with such nuance. While Beaton doesn’t shy away from showing the reality of such a peculiar social environment, that women suffer in places like this, she also shows that the suffering isn’t limited, and that people being forced to travel far from home for work that is soul-destroying, not to mention ecologically devastating, are suffering too, and the real culprit is capitalism, a system that devalues people and communities, a system that pushes people to the point of breaking.
Beaton’s dream is to work in museums, putting her degree to good use, and she gets her break after a year in the oil sands, which she leaves for a part time position at a marine museum in Victoria…which turns out to barely be enough to live on, let alone pay off her loans, and so Beaton returns for another year in the Oil Sands, but here she begins publishing her comics on her Livejournal, pieces that would become Hark A Vagrant, from which Beaton would make her name, become a bestselling author, and (that rarest of things) an artist able to earn a living from her work. After a stint as a New York art sensation, Beaton once again lives in Cape Breton.
A happy ending then, but Kate Beaton is truly one in a million, and in the years since her time in the oil sands, she hasn’t forgotten what she saw, and what she learned. About humanity in the midst of inhumanity, and the worthiness of ordinary people to live good lives in the places where they come from. It’s not black and white, and that’s why Ducks is worth reading.
