Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

“I learn that I can have opportunity or I can have home. I cannot have both, and either will always hurt.”

While Katie has a strong bond with her hometown of Mabou, she knows she can’t stay. Though she is taught this from childhood, it is still difficult to face this choice as an adult. Katie presents this as a simple fact rather than something up for debate, representing the class dynamics at play here. Richer people will always have more choices while working-class people have fewer.

“‘Dad! I can’t go to some stranger’s home for Thanksgiving! […] Well but what if they’re just being nice?’

‘I think, my daughter, that is the point.’”

This quote addresses The Value of Home and Camaraderie. Katie is invited to spend the holiday with family friends, which is their way of looking after their own. Katie’s idea of home and family expands in this instance; whereas it used to mean being with her immediate relatives (and she is therefore uncomfortable spending Thanksgiving with another family), it now includes friends.

“Workplace hazards are everywhere but safety is our primary concern!”

While Katie initially takes this orientation video (with its graphic re-enactments) seriously, it becomes a recurring joke throughout the book. Some version of the video is played at every mandatory orientation, but as Katie becomes more familiar with oil sands operations, she stops taking the videos seriously. In a broader sense, this video represents the oil companies’ lack of care or support regarding workplace safety, represented here through the hyperbolic exclamation point at the end of the sentence.

“All you need here is to be a woman. You stick out, and that’s all it takes…and someone thinks they like you.

But that doesn’t make me feel good! That makes me feel like I'm not even a person! But how can I say that?”

Part of Katie’s rude awakening in the oil sands is the way men treat women. Katie is often objectified, propositioned, and harassed by her male coworkers. Unused to and uncomfortable with this sort of attention, Katie wants to say something but quickly learns it is useless. The language here reflects the “us vs. them” dynamic—Katie first views herself through the male gaze as a “you,” then responds with her own feelings using the first-person (“me,” “I”).

“‘You know, we're all in two places here [in the oil sands]. And we can get caught up in that, in our own way.’

‘Well, I’m not staying.’

‘That may be. You might think that, and that may be. But people kid themselves if they think the only life they’re living is somewhere else.’”

Thus far in the book, Katie has only been transferred once; she is still relatively naive regarding the transient, isolated, and lonely lives of oil sands workers. In this coming-of-age story, Ambrose is an elder who can provide an honest perspective. He offers to help Katie get better pay and put down roots in Aurora, knowing The Value of Home and Camaraderie, but Katie has other ideas. Ambrose gives her important advice that many other employees don’t know or don’t care to follow: Don’t neglect the present.

“The camps are the shadow population. They live here, but they don’t live here. […] Do you know how people treat a place where they don’t live? Fort McMurray is a town. I have young children there. People say bad things about Fort McMurray. But it is the crazy men in the camps.”

The taxi driver’s observation is similar to Ambrose’s advice. While Ambrose speaks from an oil sands worker’s point of view, the taxi driver speaks from the townspeople’s, an overlooked population. For him, Fort McMurray is home. Katie and many of the men she will encounter in the work camp are migrant workers and don’t consider the work camp a home. The driver’s observations of how people behave in strange places reflect The Dangers of Isolation, Transience, and Loneliness.

“‘They’re building steam injection instead of open pit mining. So, that’s good for the environment, they say.’

‘Haha—it’s good for the environment?’

‘Well, it’s not good for the environment.’”

This quote foreshadows the environmental scandal to come. Though the oil sands workers work to extract bitumen for money, they are very cognizant of the negative effects this industry has on the environment. The fact that the oil companies are marketing this new technique as “good” for the environment is both ironic and represents how little they care about the workers or the land. This is emphasized through the different italics in each character’s speech. The first, on “environment,” asks who the technique is actually “good for.” The second, on “good,” clarifies that the practice benefits the company, not the environment.

“If you want to pass the piss test, you can’t smoke weed! That stays in your system forever! But cocaine is out, like, the next day. Everyone is on that shit.”

While Katie is never seen consuming any substance more potent (or less legal) than alcohol, she becomes increasingly aware of the substance abuse in the oil sands. This sparks concern for her, though others think little of this commonplace issue. The casual attitude toward drugs is reflected in the diction here, which uses swear words and replicates informal speech patterns.

“Well, I’m sorry for all that. But we work as a team here. And listen, you knew this was a man’s world when you came, it’s not always nice. But you knew what you were getting into. […] You’re going to have to get a thicker skin. I can’t be giving anyone special treatment.”

When Katie tries to report harassment as a woman, she is immediately shot down by her male supervisor, reflecting how Patriarchal Violence Thrives in Isolated Environments. In this hypermasculine environment, women’s perspectives are rarely believed or respected, and women are often blamed for the traumas that they endure, which may or may not include retaliation.

“Leon, do you think you’re different since you came here? Do you think people are different at home than they are here?”

Katie’s experiences in Long Lake open her eyes to the dark side of the oil sands. As she becomes more familiar with the environment surrounding her, she begins to ask whether workers are like this because the oil sands changed them or if they were always like this and couldn’t show their true selves until they came there. Either way, their behavior reflects The Dangers of Isolation, Transience, and Loneliness.

“‘You were loaded, that’s not the same thing. That’s regret.’

‘Nevermind! It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter!’”

Katie’s trauma isolates her, but she fears the reactions from the men around her if she seeks help. Her fears are proven correct; though Mike is close enough to be considered a friend, he will never understand what she experienced because he is not a woman. He speaks dismissively, and Katie’s distress is reflected through the exclamation points and repetition. Repeating “it doesn’t matter”—which is clearly untrue—reflects Katie how represses her trauma to get through life at Long Lake.

“‘Well you know what they say about birds of a feather—you remember that now.’

[…]

‘If I wasn’t from Cape Breton too, you think you’d be nice to me?’

‘I’d be a clear arsehole.’”

In the oil sands, people take care of their own. Camaraderie is an essential part of life in this isolating atmosphere. Katie got her Long Lake job due to hometown connections, but the opposite is also true: Her boss is harder on her for no reason other than that they came from different places. This is a bitter truth, but Katie still benefits and helps others from Cape Breton. This shows a broader, blue-collar solidarity in the face of the “white hat” upper management.

“Do you think this place makes people better or worse? […] Well, camp’s not a normal place, is it? Nobody likes it here. Everyone wishes they were somewhere else.”

Here, Katie synthesizes her earlier questions with Ambrose’s advice. While she still has no answers for why the men act the way they do, she can add a layer of complexity to the puzzle—while many people, including her, flock to the oil sands to make money, they do so out of economic necessity rather than personal desire. This lack of desire may fuel their discontent and their awful behavior, depression, and mental health struggles.

“‘It’s not for everyone. This. Not every family can handle it. Some can, but some can't. […] The going back and forth for weeks on end. Home for a few days and gone again. […] She’s at home with the kids alone, taking care of everything. He's not there…When he comes home, it’s chaos. And the two of you might be fighting half the time over who has it worse or what’s not getting done or money. Kids half fucking crazy when he’s out the door again and you've got to deal with that every few weeks. Jesus, I’m glad I never had kids!’

‘Why would anyone come here knowing it could tear their life apart?’

‘Why would anyone think it would happen to them?’”

Katie is also susceptible to viewing circumstances from a limited perspective—in her case, she has no experience with the children or wives who are left behind at home and rarely visited by the men who work in the oil sands. Katie is justified in her anger because these men often cheat on their wives or neglect their families. However, Leon points out the flip side, highlighting how the situation is difficult for men who feel emotionally estranged from their families and unable to express their feelings. Katie is subsequently chastened because the patriarchal expectations that harm her also harm men.

“‘It’s about Cape Breton. […] It’s called…‘An Innis Aigh’—‘The Happy Island.’

‘Haha—Funny that it sounds so sad!’”

Katie hears songs reminiscent of her hometown several times throughout the book, and her experience with them changes as her worldview develops and matures. Initially, they were just songs from her childhood, ingrained in her culture. In Long Lake, she begins to understand the loneliness of the lyrics as she struggles with her trauma, but in Victoria, she truly understands both the lyrics and the emotion of the music.

“Did you know she took out all the bawdy stories from her collections because she didn’t think them fit to print? […] Makes you wonder what was left out though, doesn’t it? It’s nice, but it’s not the whole picture.”

On the surface, Katie’s observation of Creighton’s book is a nod to her degrees in history and anthropology. On a deeper level, it speaks to both the oil sands experience—a story that is little known and spoken of less—and Ducks itself. Not all stories fit into a book, and not all perspectives about working in the oil sands are shared. Beaton invites her readers to think about what might be missing from the picture she shares.

“‘Well, I don’t suppose you could bother to do your job and find out how many white hard hats and nice safety vests we have?’

‘What do you mean nice? Like the one you have on? We have none of those.’

‘And the guys are always asking for them.’”

This quote is an example of how clothes represent class disparities. Ryan’s priorities are making sure that there is enough high-quality safety gear for the upcoming upper management visit; as a white hat himself, this represents both his focus and hierarchical alignment. Katie and Emily are blue-collar workers, so their responses align them with the opposite side. The “have-not” workers value and would use nice safety gear, but they are never the ones who receive it.

“‘Are those your…feminine products?’

‘They are.’

‘Do you want to…close your bag.’

‘No, I like how they make men uncomfortable.’”

This quote highlights how Katie has grown between leaving Cape Breton and now. Before, Katie did her best to blend into the background and be invisible to men, and she suffered for her efforts. After her freedom in Victoria and finding a safer job in administration, Katie can finally push back against patriarchal power dynamics. She uses her femininity as power; though skirts are still impractical, she has other ways to use her gender to her advantage.

“‘That can’t, like, work though, right?’

‘Well, someone high up thinks ducks are pretty fucking stupid.’”

Katie and her coworkers are sarcastic about upper management’s “anti-waterfowl” deterrent strategies. From the beginning, no one believes these methods are effective, but like the safety videos, their true purpose is to protect the companies from lawsuits rather than birds from toxic substances. It is one more way that capitalism takes priority over the greater good, and it only occurs at all because of the scandal’s public attention.

“First Nation people’s lives pay for the price of the oil they take out of our land here. […] Their almighty dollar comes first. That’s pretty sad. You can’t eat money. At the cost of our lives—as long as they get their money. They don’t care how many of us they kill off.”

To oil companies, First Nation communities rank similarly to the ducks. Although oil companies hire archaeology specialists to survey land before they dig, local First Nations communities aren’t included on their lists of “important things.” While Katie wasn’t as aware of this at the time, Beaton takes care to include this perspective as the author because, unlike the oil companies, she understands the importance of Indigenous perspectives.

“I didn’t think anything of coming here. Going to Alberta was like going to the moon. It was just so far beyond. Now I can’t extract myself from having gone.”

As Katie becomes more aware of the effects of the industry she works for and increasingly entrenched in it, she finds it difficult to take a definitive stand during the environmental scandal. On one hand, she values nature and empathizes with the Fort McKay First Nations (she, too, suffers from adverse health effects on a smaller scale). On the other, she understands the perspectives of workers like herself who need the money from this job to survive. Like Cape Breton, it seems, you can have one or the other but not both.

“The worst part for me about being harassed here isn’t that people say shitty things. It’s when they say them and they sound like me, in the accent I dropped when I went to university. That they look like my cousins and uncles, you know, even though they’re from all over the country…that they are familiar. And that this place creates that where it didn’t exist before.”

This quote is Katie’s answer to her earlier questions about the oil sands and the men who work there. For Katie, it ultimately almost doesn’t matter whether the oil sands create bad men. What matters is the intersection of home and the oil sands. If her harassers weren’t her people, she could draw a mental boundary between herself and them. When they are her people, she feels cognitive dissonance between what she expects and what she experiences. Above all, she fears that even home will no longer be safe.

“‘Things are shady in the shadow population.’

[…]

‘No one ever asks if anyone else is doing okay when they’re not.’”

As Katie becomes more aware of the pervasiveness of substance abuse, she calls out the oil companies for their lack of support. Rather than setting up safety meetings to address true—if illegal—problems, they ignore the issues to maintain their positive image. At the same time, the men, who are taught to just “deal with it” (or, like Katie was told, to “get a thicker skin”) are not taught to check in with each other or that doing so is a strength rather than a weakness. As a result, they lose colleagues in preventable disasters.