Kate Beaton’s new graphic memoir chronicles two years the Canadian cartoonist spent working in the Athabasca oil sands, in northeastern Alberta.
. Laborers die in their trucks, accidentally run over by colleagues driving haulers the size of small houses. Alcoholism and substance abuse are rampant; the company tests for marijuana, so the miners simply use harder drugs. There’s not much status to fight over in the mines, and perhaps that’s why so many people seem so eager for it. Katie is obviously out of place. She’s new and young and doesn’t know what she’s doing. And she’s a woman and almost all the workers at the mine are men.
The largest entity in the oil sands is a snarl of contracts between state and private companies called Syncrude. Mildred Lake, where Katie works at the beginning of the book, is the base mine for Syncrude, and it sits near a town where many young families live. Later, Katie transfers to another mine, Long Lake, that is still under construction. There are no families or communal ties. Everyone living in the camp is savagely, unrelentingly homesick.
As Katie takes on harder, riskier, and higher-paying jobs, her life gets worse. Eventually things are bad enough that she decides to leave the oil sands. She goes even farther west, to Victoria, and takes a low-paying clerical job at a museum, which she tries to supplement with various, similarly low-paying service jobs.