Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
Year: 2022
Author: Kate Beaton
Length: 430 pages
Having only really experienced Kate Beaton’s web comic, Hark! A Vagrant and her sillier material, I was interested to see how a graphic novel of her life would play out on the printed page. I was shocked to find her somewhat whimsical style had so much emotion for a story that was assuredly a difficult one to tell. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is as gripping as it is frustrating that such working conditions remain this dangerous for women.
Telling the story of how Beaton paid off her student loans from art school in the fastest way possible, Ducks highlights the misogyny and sexism present in the (frankly) male-dominated field of petroleum. Working on the oil sands isn’t safe in a physical sense, but add to that the “hanging with the guys” tropes that eventually lead to assault. It was hard to read sections of this book, knowing that men should be better than this. Beaton pours her trauma out on the page and it stuck with me in a way that only a graphic novel like this could convey.
I’d say that this book should be required reading for both men and women going into these fields, but I know it probably wouldn’t change anything. There’s too much inertia to effect the significant changes that would need to happen. This shouldn’t lessen discussions about the depression, substance abuse, and suicide that men in these jobs endure, but instead highlight the tenuous strengths and inevitable weakness of humans pushed to their breaking points. For some, though, it is a lifestyle. For the lucky ones, they make it out alive in as little time as possible—which is still long enough to have lasting negative effects on their lives.
A deeply moving memoir about women working in a male-dominated field, I give Ducks 5.0 stars out of 5.
