2023-12-10 | Ducks, Fallen Leaves
Ducks is Kate Beaton’s comic memoir about two years in the Alberta tar sands.
The migration is a familiar one in Canada - people from poorer provinces (the Maritimes) go to west to make bank
in the oil industry. So did an early-twenties Kate, paying off student loans. The book is a visual diary - drawn scenes
from two years of a life, a constantly shifting background of characters, snippets of conversation, short snapshots,
longer ones. Cold, space, coffee, snow, hard hats, giant machines, fly-in labour camps, drawn in monochrome. No narrative,
just testimony at a specific place and time. Isolation, alienation, corporate alibism, brutal interpersonal situations, extractive
dynamics, and also, sometimes, flashes of gentle human ones. It’s the most Canadian reckoning I’ve read this year
and I very much recommend it.
I know northern Alberta, a bit, from several years in a different remote fly-in manual labour job (silviculture,
or manually replanting the clearcuts: sustainability in action). Planting trees is is of course very different
from oil sands work: it’s seasonal, and the demographic is mostly people in their twenties and thirties,
often funding university degrees. Women are a minority, but not always a drastic one, and few of us expected to do it
for thirty years. The exhaustion and satisfaction that came from doing a brutally difficult job well was maybe
transferable, as was the sense of fighting the physical landscape - lighting waxed boxes in June snowstorms to keep
warm, winching Ford F-350’s out of bogs, interminable miles of hostile logging road, dirt under dirt. For me, an
immigrant from central Europe, it was the first time I saw the landscape bulk of Canada: the Canada that was, and is,
built on resource extraction. I was visiting it, as, ultimately, was Beaton. I think her report back will be taught in
secondary schools. It should be.
Important in Ducks is an account of assaults. That happened in silviculture too, and elsewhere, multiple times; not to me.
The man was inevitably never charged; fired, sometimes, but often not, and has a name and an address and all of the women
who were there know it, and as often as not continues life as an Ontario golden boy with a guitar. (I realized, maybe
surprisingly recently, that one of the big projects of my life (how-to-be-and-why) was to continue to feel and recognize
anger and to react to the world that produces it but to not let it become part of my being-ness.)
Implicit in Ducks is the question of to what extent the
disassociation forms the people, or vice versa, etc, — more important is the story. Read Ducks.
(I know Kate Beaton because someone great introduced me to her very silly, very great
{historical webcomic} in university. Recommended.)
Fallen Leaves, Aki Kaurismäki’s new film, reminded me of Ducks in its scissor-cut scene quality. The plot isn’t the point:
briefly, two people in Finland meet, and then fail to meet again, and then fail to meet again again (and then meet, maybe).
The point are the scenes, which are perfectly composed, the triumphantly bleak humour, the staying power, the subdued
surrealism, the excellent dog, the washed out bright colours, the wry eyebrows. It won all the awards at Cannes and elsewhere,
which makes sense. In theory it is a darkly funny film about bleak situations; in practice it cheered me up more
than most things these past weeks. As my friend Kit says - keep up the persistence.