Faced with low job security and unable to pay off her loans, she returns to the oil fields.

Fed up with her experience, she leaves to work in Victoria, British Columbia, where she begins cartooning and creates Hark! A Vagrant. Though Beaton empathizes with many of the workers and their economic plight, the labour force is overwhelmingly male, and she is subjected to sexual harassment and finds little sympathy. She meets other migrant workers, many of whom are from Eastern Canada. She initially works in a tool crib at Mildred Lake for Syncrude but also works at Long Lake and in various other camps taking on different roles. Like many in Atlantic Canada, she is forced to seek work elsewhere whereas previous generations would travel to work in fisheries, coal mines, or auto manufacturing plants, the mid-2000s oil boom led many Easterners to work in the oil industry. Raised in Mabou, Nova Scotia, and fresh out of Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, she needs to work in order to pay off her student debt. Summary ĭucks is a memoir of Beaton's experiences working in the oil fields in Alberta starting in 2005. The book is named after a disaster in which hundreds of ducks died after landing in a toxic tailings pond. It is an account of her experience as a woman from Atlantic Canada working in the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta in order to pay off her student loans.

Published by Drawn & Quarterly in 2022, Ducks is an extension of a five-part webcomic Beaton initially posted to Tumblr in 2014. 2022 autobiographical comic by Kate Beaton Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sandsĭucks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an autobiographical comic by Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton.

Ducks two years