“I don’t think people like her believe that the men they know wouldn’t be any different,” she says. When she’s interviewed by a journalist who wants her to go over all the worst harassment she’s experienced at camp, her hackles rise. Yet Beaton feels a certain amount of protectiveness for the men she works with. The harassment keeps going and escalates. She asks her supervisor if she can be put on another task that leaves her less on display, and he tells her he can’t offer her special treatment. When she arrives at one new camp, men line up around the building to get a look at her and loudly discuss their opinions of her body. In the isolated, macho social landscape that results, sexual harassment becomes the norm.īeaton finds the doorknob of her dorm room jiggling at night and has to keep it locked. Most of the people who work there have minimal education, and many of them have migrated from their homes, as Beaton did, in search of better wages. The camps are populated mostly by men, who outnumber women in the oil sands by 50 to 1. When she makes it to a camp where the dorms come with fake plants, she’s overwhelmed. Sometimes she lives in an empty little apartment that requires a 6 am bus ride into camp sometimes she lives on site in a dorm equipped with only a bed and a shelf. In Alberta, Beaton bounces from mine to mine.

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What she knew, she writes, was that Alberta was “the place to go to find the good job, the good money, the better life.” But Ducks quickly makes it clear that “the good life” is relative. None of that was exactly clear to Beaton when she set off for Alberta in 2005. They’re also considered some of the most environmentally destructive oil fields in the world, and Indigenous populations say the mines have been ruinous to their way of life. The mines are large enough to be seen from space. When it’s over, she’ll go back to the real world.Īlberta’s oil sands are the third-largest oil reserve in the world.

It will be a break from her life, a lark. Her plan is to work so much that she can pay off her student loans in two years. Saddled with an arts degree that leaves her feeling unemployable and a small mountain of student debt, Beaton leaves her beloved home of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, for the oil sands of Alberta, where work is plentiful and life is cheap. Ducks begins in 2005, with Beaton as a 21-year-old newly minted college graduate.

Kate beaton art