In April 2008, an international media storm erupted over the death of 1,600 ducks in a toxic pond in Alberta, Western Canada. Kate Beaton remembers it well, because she was working there at the time. “All of a sudden the whole world turned their heads and they’re like: ‘What’s going on over there? Doesn’t look good to me.’ Because of the ducks. And I was like: ‘It’s terrible about the ducks, but I see people around me failing. I see a lot more than that going on, too, and no one seems to care. What about the workers? What about the cancer rates in the Indigenous communities?’”
A decade and a half later, Beaton has piled her memories of life in a camp in Alberta – built to exploit one of the world’s largest single oil deposits – into a chunky, no-holds-barred graphic novel memoir titled Ducks: Two Years on the Oil Sands. She was 21 years old, and had just finished a degree in history and anthropology, when she left her home on an island off the easternmost tip of Canada for the job more than 2,000 miles away.
As the child of a working-class family who didn’t want to be a teacher, she could see no other way of paying off her student debt. “The only message we got about a better future was that we had to leave home to have one,” she writes. “We did not question it, because this is the have-not region of a have-not province and it has not boomed here in generations.”
Alberta was the place to find a better life – “it’s booming there … no end to the money,” Beaton writes. She arrived to find herself in an isolated camp, handing out tools in a warehouse 12 hours a day to men brutalised by spending months on end cut off from their homes and families. “They call them the shadow populations. You’re not part of any community. You fly in and fly out,” she says.
As she went on to make her name as an award-winning cartoonist in Canada and the US, the story still haunted her. Little by little, Beaton started to put out scenes on her website, to see if anyone was interested. They were, but it is only now that she has had the time and energy to collect them all into a book.
“I had many interruptions in my life along the way,” she says. “My sister was diagnosed with cancer, and we lost her in 2018. And then I had two children. If I had done this at any other time, I think I would have finished it quicker. But that’s life for you.”
It’s 8am in Nova Scotia when we talk, and Beaton’s eldest child is racing around in pyjamas, trying to escape her dad. “Potty-training: it’s a land of tears and devastation,” says Beaton, now 39, rolling her eyes.
Ducks is her first full-length work. It’s nothing like the skittish cartoon strips that made her name, bringing together unlikely historical figures – Richard II, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Ada Lovelace, perhaps, or Isaac Newton, Harvey Milk and former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam – though there’s a wry intertextuality as you see her drawing the first of these Hark! A Vagrant strips late at night in her room at the camp, or being told off for sneaking scans from the site photocopier.
The book relates a dark story in monochrome, its chronological sections of tightly framed memoir separated by generous spreads of the landscape in which she found herself. It’s a tortured terrain, scarred by the tracks of monstrous diggers, belching smoke out of huge chimneys, but it’s also a place of wide, starry skies, with occasional dreamy glimpses of the northern lights.
In 2016, this landscape prompted another news story when huge wildfires closed the town of Fort McMurray, which serviced the camps, underlining a bigger issue of environmental breakdown to which the oilfields contribute. But Beaton holds her focus on the two years she spent there, when her mettle was tested up to, and beyond, its limits by the more local threat of social and behavioural breakdown, which landed her in many difficult situations.
As one of a handful of women in a camp full of men, she was under constant threat of sexual assault. She’s keen not to give away the details. “I’ve always worried, putting this book out, that this would be what people took away from it the most, and then what it would be reduced to, because that’s what happens to women’s stories. Only then do they become ‘great,’” she says. “But I also hope to build empathy and fear; I want them to worry about my character being in a dangerous place, and feel as scared for her as I felt at the time. If readers know, off the bat, what is going to happen, it robs it of that power.”
Suffice it to say that she was an innocent abroad, completely unequipped to deal with problems of camp life, unaware that many of her co-workers were anaesthetising themselves with whatever drugs they could lay their hands on. With hindsight she is protective of them. There’s an undertow of class anger in the book – about the media trying to monster these blue-collar workers for the entertainment of well-heeled readers, whose wealth saves them from ever having to brave such hell-holes.
“I feel like when you talk about the use of drugs and stuff out there, people have a lack of sympathy, because they’re making lots of money, and there’s a perception that it’s about bad choices: you did this to yourself,” says Beaton. “But it’s a trap that they fall into.”
Among those who fell was her boss, Ryan – a young father and “one of the good guys” – who became increasingly erratic at work before disappearing one day without trace. She caught up with him years later through Facebook and consulted him for the memoir. “Yes, there were pamphlets advertising a helpline but they weren’t worth shit. Those people weren’t trained to deal with the reality of people in crisis. And there were lots of people in crisis,” she says. “Then because of the camp culture, when they leave the job, they’re just gone from your life, which is traumatic in itself, and as soon as they’re off the site, the parent companies are absolved of any responsibility.” It’s the story of migrant workers all over the world.
One of the challenges was depicting boredom without becoming boring: she had to find a shape for the story that couldn’t be relationship-driven, because people were always moving on. “Boredom is one of the things that chips away at the mental health of people who live in the camps,” she says. “You go into work, and you do the same thing every day. You’re living in this tiny room. If you’re a woman, you can’t use the gym without all the men jammed in the doorway watching you.”
Her first year-long contract predated social media, and there was no working internet. Astonishingly, she returned for a second stint at a different camp, this time in admin, after a year working in a maritime museum in Victoria, but by that time things had changed. “I walked out of somewhere that felt completely isolated and I couldn’t write. I walked back into one that had good internet in your room at night, so I was making my comic online. It was something that gave me joy and made me feel like myself, when sometimes you did not feel like yourself at work, because people would reduce you to whatever thing they saw in front of them.”
Her time in the museum gave her the idea of creating the historic vignettes of Hark! A Vagrant, and the leisure to set up her own rudimentary website to display them. Before long they started to sell, as they have done ever since. Hers is an unusual success story, in a comics world where most writers depend on other sources of income. It’s one reason why there are so few comics about blue-collar life, she suggests.
“I am an anomaly and I owe a lot of that to the time when I started,” she says. “The internet was still small enough that people were actually going to people’s websites to read things, which they don’t any more. They were looking for new voices in comics. I qualified as a new voice, because I was making these esoteric sorts of things in niche comics, but they were broad enough that people responded to them. I hit a nerve.”
She moved to New York, found an agent and joined a women’s cartooning collective, Pizza Island. “We just happened to be all women, but people were like: ‘Wow, women making comics in a room.’ And for some reason that also hit a nerve. There was a vision of us as something more than just a bunch of people with our headphones on. We even had someone asking if they could make a reality show about us.”
But after several years of paying too much rent, and having her bicycle stolen, she decided to return to Canada, first to Toronto and then back home to her family in Nova Scotia, where – thanks to the internet – you no longer have to leave to make a life. She has since diversified into picture books for children, bringing her quirky humour to stories of an ambitious princess and her hapless, farting pony and a spoilt baby who behaves like a king. Their bright colours are a million miles away from the sombre hues of Ducks, the story she had to tell. She has daily WhatsApp chats with the Pizza Island gang. Motherhood is what they mostly talk about now, she says. “I’ll probably complain about the potty training later today.”
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton is published by Jonathan Cape (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
