“It feels like we’re were all ‘out of sight, out of mind’,” Warden Jim muttered one day, his voice heavy with the weight of his own dull existence. I could see it in his face—the kind of boredom that gnaws at you, the kind that makes you question whether time still moves forward or if you’ve simply ceased to exist in the real world. His son, “Don”, wasn’t faring much better.
Don had never dreamed of becoming a glorified prison guard in a cult-funded rehab. He was supposed to be someone. Instead, he was a Canaan Land “counselor” in a remote religious gulag, babysitting a bunch of us miserable captives while his father played warden. The job didn’t suit him. It wasn’t in his blood to enforce rules; he was just stuck—trapped by the weight of his name, his father’s expectations, and the endless monotony of watching over a group of kids and adults desperate to leave and live in the real world.
And then, one day, someone did.
It was a dull Sunday afternoon. Two brothers—one legal age, one not—decided they’d had enough. Their moment of rebellion arrived right after a mandatory Sunday church visit in Saskatoon. No grand plan, no whispered conspiracies—just an abrupt, “We’re out,” as they grabbed their bags from the van and bolted. For a moment, we all just… watched. Even Don.
And something inside him cracked.
Escape. Not theirs. His.
All this time, he had been babysitting participants in a prison he never chose, and here were these two brothers doing what he’d never dared to—leaving. Just leaving.
So, the next day Don did the unthinkable. The son of the warden, the one expected to uphold order, simply stood up, walked to the door, and left. No dramatic chase, no last-minute intervention. He just… walked away. His boots crunched against the gravel as he climbed into his Jeep and drove off, feeling a sensation he had nearly forgotten—freedom. By sundown, he was in Prince Albert, far from the land of never-ending rules and forced prayers.
He climbed into his Jeep and drove off, feeling a sensation he had nearly forgotten—freedom
After Don’s escape, there was the participant Matt—the underage thorn in Jim’s side—who found his own way out. Not by running, but by making himself so unbearable that Jim finally snapped and kicked him out. I wondered what consequences he’d face on the outside, but I had no way of knowing. Not yet.
Then there was “William”. No grand declarations, no sudden acts of defiance—just one moment he was there, and the next, gone. We were staying at a Saskatoon motel after a revival service, the usual mind-numbing routine. But the next morning, William’s bed was empty. His luggage? Vanished. A quick search of the bathroom, the hallway, outside—nothing. It was as if he had been erased. I knocked on Jim’s door to report it, half-expecting him to have an explanation or idea where William went. He didn’t.
The final escape was the most poetic. One of the participants caught wind that an old enemy was about to join the program. He didn’t hesitate. He grabbed his things and fled like the hounds of hell were at his heels. “I can’t,” was all he said. And that was that. Gone, for good.
And me?
I was still there.
Not because I didn’t want to run, but because running wasn’t as simple for me. Escape meant freedom, sure, but it also meant consequences—ones that extended beyond me. The risks weren’t just for me but for my family, their stability, their support. Shianne Klassen had already laid out those somber facts when I had arrived. My path wasn’t a mad dash through the trees or a late-night disappearance. My only way out was to endure. To outlast. To wait it out as long as it took. As a fifteen year old, the best I could tell was that it meant I was stuck there until I turned 18. More than 2 years in a bizarre religious rehab program where far more people abruptly left than the very few who finished it. I hated all 1,156,320 excruciating minutes of it.
Take my word for it; that feels so, so far away when you are just 15. And eventually, I did make it out. Not with a midnight sprint or a dramatic getaway, but by surviving long enough to walk out through the front doors. And when I did, the world outside hadn’t stopped for me. It had moved on, indifferent to the years I had lost. My mom’s presence felt both familiar and foreign, like a song I used to know by heart but couldn’t quite sing along to anymore. Friends had grown into strangers. Even my own reflection felt borrowed, like I had aged without truly living.
I wanted to feel triumphant, to celebrate my survival, but the truth was quieter than that. Leaving wasn’t an ending. It was just the start of untangling what had been done to me. The world outside had freedom, yes—but it also had questions, memories, and the nagging realization that “out” didn’t necessarily mean “free.” The world outside didn’t know what I had been through. It didn’t stop to acknowledge the quiet war I had fought every single day in that place. To them, I was just another teenager stepping into adulthood, no different from anyone else my age. I knew I wasn’t the same kid who had entered Canaan Land. I had learned to bite my tongue, to nod in silence, to make myself small enough to go unnoticed. Even now, I caught myself hesitating before speaking, waiting for permission that would never come.
But I was here. I had made it out. Yet in some ways, I was still there. Not in body, but in the ingraining of their rituals, their rules etched into my thoughts, the guilt that flared up when I did something as simple as listen to a song I wasn’t supposed to. I carried it with me, heavy and invisible, in ways I hadn’t expected. I had spent years counting down, believing that freedom started the moment I stepped outside. But no one tells you that leaving isn’t the same as being free.
So I learned. I learned that leaving is different from escaping. That survival is different from healing. That if I could endure that place, I could endure whatever came next. That time lost can’t be reclaimed, only reckoned with.
And I’m still reckoning with it.
I don’t know what happened to all the others. Some found sanctuary. Some are still ghosts. Maybe they found freedom. Maybe they found new cages. But I do know one thing—when you escape a place like that, it never fully lets go of you.
“When you escape a place like that, it never fully lets go of you.”