Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

You might be tempted to dismiss Beaton's ability to tackle a more weighty memoir if you've only known her from her Hark! A Vagrant days, but she nails the industrial desolation of a Syncrude mining operation — the biting cold, the hulking machines, and the poison spewing industry of it all. That implacable desolation mirrors her own experience as she arrives in the oil sands in the hopes of severing the “weighted anchor” of $40K of student debt in a place where women are outnumbered 50 to 1.

It goes badly and yet Beaton exhibits far more empathy than you might expect. This could have easily been a sensationalist story, given to all the salacious detail and harrowing experiences — exactly what a reporter from the Globe and Mail kept fishing for in a later chapter to fill out her preconceived story. But Beaton can't help but wonder how the loneliness, homesickness and boredom might affect someone's brother or dad or husband.

So many have come from away, from coastal towns where the fishing has dried up, the mines long since closed, where opportunity requires a plane trip away from family, from home. It's a place where the death of hundreds of ducks in a tailing pond receives more national interest than the poisoning of Native lands, mining operations set up right next door to Indian settlements where young people are increasingly dying of cancer, the plants and animals spoiled by the poisons sent into the environment. And there are the workers and the mental toll that isolation breeds, the ugly aspects of self revealed, the people chewed up by this extractive industry. This is one hell of a memoir.