Best-selling Cape Breton author pens memoir offering insight into oil-camp life

What it's like to work in the Alberta oil fields Todd Battis speaks with Kate Beaton, a N.S. cartoonist, about her new book on her experiences working in the Alberta oil fields.

An author and cartoonist from Mabou, N.S., is finding commercial and critical success with her new autobiography, “Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands.”

The New York Times best-selling graphic novel chronicles Kate Beaton’s life as she leaves her small Nova Scotia town to work in Alberta with hopes of paying down her student loan.

It’s a journey many Maritime families know well, but Beaton says she wanted to show the human side of an industry often overshadowed by political conversation.

“The images that we get that are of these gigantic machines and gigantic sites, and you forget that there are human beings in there,” said Beaton.

In writing the book, she wanted to bring in as many stories and perspectives as possible to try to show, and share, the full picture of what it is like to live in a work camp.

While a lot of Maritimers know what it’s like to work in a camp, either first or secondhand, not everyone in the country is as aware of the realities, she said.

“People fly in and fly out, they are distinctly removed from normal society,” said Beaton. “All of the issues that come with living there are cut off.”

A retelling of her time there as a young woman, she says the book is rife with instances of harassment. And, while not every man working in a camp is like that, “a few people who were that way is enough to ruin your day,” said Beaton.

“Bosses will tell you, ‘It’s a man’s world.”

She says, while working in camps from 2005 to 2008, conversations around mental health and substance abuse did not happen.

“There wasn’t any talk about how the isolation and loneliness and access to drugs and alcohol and everything like that affected the mental health of workers.”

Presenting her story in graphic form allowed her to better showcase the emotion and vast landscapes she wanted to portray, said Beaton.

“The way that people are with one another physically, it emotes the place in a way that you can’t do in prose.”

“Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands” is available on Amazon.