There is something in Beaton’s work I have always loved: her whimsical love of people and humanity and the various ways people as a whole are largely kind of fucked but in a silly kind of way. Beaton is from the east coast of Canada and, as many of the workers in the oil sands were in those days, was in search of work that just wasn’t available in their home province. People that were drawn to this sort of work in an effort to provide for themselves, to stave off debt or to prepare for their future. The story Beaton lays out in Ducks is one we don’t hear very often. Kate Beaton’s ( Hark! A Vagrant) new graphic novel Ducks is an autobiographical account of her two years working in various work camps in the Fort McMurray oil sands in an effort to pay off her student debt as she emerged back into the world from her post-secondary education. I was a blue collar worker then too I knew it felt like the barbs of their thorns. That talk was often never flowery or pretty, lacking a certain depth. When the oil sands were at their peak, those who didn’t work in this kind of work talked a lot about the sort of people that did. Roughneck men making money and burning it away on the endless parties of their off hours. It’s a part of the country, staunchly blue collar and working class, that was easy to look down liberal noses at. One of the many remembrance markers on the side of the road is for my childhood friend Rob, whose truck went end over end one morning as he and others, also in trucks, rushed to get back to work. Trucks and cars that have succumbed to desolate weather and desperate drivers. The highway of death is named as such due to the sheer amount of fatalities on that stretch of road. Young people from all over flocked to Alberta in the early 2000s in an effort to shore up enough money to live the life they drew for themselves in their heads.
There’s a stretch of road in Canada called the Highway of Death - aka Highway 63 - that leads into Fort McMurray, which for a time was the place to go if you wanted to earn a lot of money in Canada. The Autostraddle Encyclopedia of Lesbian Cinema.LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.
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