Ducks is a hefty 400+ page story; I read it in two sittings and it was in the 2nd part of my reading that I finally understood what the book was really about. It opens in 2005 as Kate has finished university with a staggering amount of student debt and no jobs in her field. Unable to earn a decent living in her home province of Nova Scotia, she looks to the Alberta oil sands as a means to make quick money to pay off her student loans. Beaton takes pains at the outset to describe Nova Scotia and its continual loss of residents as locals move to other provinces for better prospects. As such, on my first night of reading Ducks I thought that was the subject of the book - how Nova Scotians are forced to leave the land they love just to make a decent wage. That's part of the story, but not the largest part of Ducks.
It was my 2nd night reading Ducks that the true content of the book became apparent and then I couldn't put it down and had to finish it at once. Ultimately this book is about the impact of environment on people's psyches. The men whom Kate interacts with at the work camps are cut off from real communities - they spend most of their free time getting drunk and looking for sex. After Kate's sister Becky comes to work in the oil sands they have a conversation about the environment and wonder what their own father would be like if he had worked on one of those sites.
There are recurring scenes centered on workplace safety - lectures to staff in which no one seems to be paying attention. Stories Kate hears second-hand about men who died on the site or succumbed to drugs. One of her superiors seems to suffering from suicidal thoughts. The office celebrates 'millions' of man hours "without a lost time incident," meaning an incident in which someone was injured. Kate's superior explains that lost time incidents "look bad for the company so we don't have them." It exists but goes unreported. Kate's point seems to be that for all the emphasis her employers put on workplace safety there was little to no concern about what causes these breakdowns or what's going on inside the minds of the workers who are clearly not adjusting well to life on the work camps. The title "Ducks" stems from an incident during Kate's time in the oil sands where more than 500 ducks died in the sludge produced by the oil sands. The companies take measures to prevent future deaths of ducks but in a half-hearted way, with one employee surmising the new measures are there only so the oil companies can claim they tried to prevent future tragedies. Just as the oil companies care little for the plight of the ducks beyond bad optics, they care little for the lives and wellbeing of their employees.
There are two instances (just after where I stopped reading the first night) where Kate is raped by co-workers. These scenes are represented by black pages - a 'blackout' in her memoir. On the one hand, I'm glad the rapes were not depicted on-panel. On the other hand, it still extremely disturbing when the black pages appear. Just before her first rape, Kate tried to express to her boss how she felt about being one of the only women in the work camp and how uncomfortable the attention all the men were giving her made her felt (as well as the men wasting time by asking her for tools they didn't need just so they could gaze at her). Her boss responded, "you knew what you were getting into." Kate ended up apologizing to her boss.
Both of the rapes occur during Kate's first year, after which she went to Victoria to work in a museum, her chosen career, for one year; but after an unfriendly call from her student loan office (they don't get into it but I assume the cost of living in Victoria made it harder to save money for her loans) she went back for a 2nd year in the oil sands. When she left for Victoria at first I felt relieved - then I noticed the book had another 200 pages remaining... Seeing her return to the oil sands made me feel sick for her, although the 2nd year is much less disturbing - she works in an office instead of a tool crib, keeping her away from most of the men. Still, that she returned to a situation as awful as that simply to pay off her debt turns my stomach.
If nothing else, I hope I've conveyed that Ducks is not an easy read. It made me upset and angry - quite the opposite of what her humour comics achieve! Ducks left me stunned, but also determined to share this book with people in my life who I know will connect very strongly to the subject matter.
Ducks was published by Drawn & Quarterly.
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