ducks two years in the oil sands kate beaton

There is poison here too, even if it gleams like gold. During a break from camp, she works in Victoria, British Columbia’s “Garden City”, where graceful, leafy boulevards mask homelessness, and insufficiently cheerful employees are fired on the spot. “They don’t think that the loneliness and the homesickness and boredom and lack of women around would affect their brother or dad or husband the same way,” she tells a colleague. When a journalist phones about trouble in the camps, Katie smells hypocrisy. But the problem is not confined to the sands Ducks is also a critique of a wider world that’s eager for cheap energy and careless of the way it is made. The workers, isolated, institutionalised and living in a place that is profoundly temporary – one day the oil will run out – have little reason to respect their environment. These are not one-off incidents but part of a wider culture of commodification and entitlement. She and her few female colleagues learn to live with nicknames (“perky”, “ducky”, “little miss”, “cougar”), but intimidation is followed, with terrifying banality, by violence. Necks bend as she walks past, men lean on the tool crib counter to ogle her and strangers jiggle her locked door at night. Sores appear on Katie’s back from the foul air, and male eyes are almost always upon her. One worker dies in a highway crash, another has a heart attack in a crane, a third is crushed by a lorry.

These scenes hum with life, and many would make a fine evocation of any workplace. Colleagues, by turns cheerful, brusque, resigned, crass, sweet or despairing, ease in and out of focus as Katie changes jobs, moves sites and struggles to fit in. “Cheap labour,” explains Beaton, “where booming industry demanded it.” She takes time to show the everyday: the grumbling, the pen-pushing, strange quirks, embarrassment, camaraderie, boredom and discomfort. It’s a soul-sapping environment, staffed mostly by out-of-state workers who, like the land, are a resource to be exploited. But Katie will spend most of her time indoors, working long hours in the institutional corridors and prefab cabins that squat on this scarred wilderness.

Gargantuan vehicles tear at the earth, leaving watery pits and rubble in their wake. Katie first rolls in, hunched and groggy on a pre-dawn bus, to see a shock of towers, flames and fumes blaring out of the darkness. Illustration: Kate Beatonĭucks builds its world with unhurried, immersive naturalism. Beaton’s Alberta is a world of frozen land and massive trucks.

Ducks two years in the oil sands kate beaton