Alina Stashane’s Reviews > Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands > Status Update

‘i learn that i can have opportunity or i can have home. i cannot have both, and either will always hurt.

i learn, by twenty-one, that any job is a good job. even a bad one is a good job; you’re lucky to have it.’

‘i need to tell you this - there is no knowing cape breton without knowing how deeply ingrained two diametrically opposed experiences are:

a deep love for home, and the knowledge of how frequently we have to leave it to find work somewhere else.’

‘the only message we got about a better future was that we had to leave home to have one.

we did not question it, because this is the have-not region of a have-not province, and it has not boomed here in generations.’