There’s a question I seem to hear almost every time I meet someone new in Squamish.
“What brought you here?”
I’m not sure whether that is a Squamish thing, a Canadian thing, or just a question that comes up naturally here.
For my family, the short answer is that we came for one year.
We just never left.
We came for a gap year
I was born and raised in Korea, and most of my life had been there.
I went through a fairly familiar sequence. School, university, work, marriage, a child. My wife worked hard too. I became especially absorbed in my own work because I had found something I genuinely enjoyed doing, and I gave it a lot of my time.
Around then, I had opportunities to meet people who were further along in their careers than I was. Many had achieved the kinds of things that, from the outside, looked very successful.
When some of them talked about their grown children, those conversations stayed with me.
I didn’t know their families well enough to judge their relationships. What they did was make me think about my own.
My daughter was still young, around the beginning of elementary school. She is our only child, and I started wondering how I would feel years later if I had done well at work but somehow missed the chance to build a close relationship with her.
I thought I would regret that.
And I didn’t want to wait until later to find out.
So my wife and I made a fairly sudden decision.
We would stop for a year.
We would leave Korea, step away from work, and give our family time together.
A gap year.
The decision happened surprisingly quickly. Within about a month, we were looking at maps and talking about different countries and different places where we might spend that year.
Squamish ended up on the list for a simple reason: we already knew it a little.
My first Squamish winter
The year before, my wife and daughter had spent about a month in Squamish while my daughter studied English.
I came to visit them for around ten days.
It was winter, and there was a lot of snow.
I had been working hard right up until the trip, and almost as soon as I arrived, I got sick. So my first experience of Squamish was not some beautiful moment when I looked at the mountains and immediately decided I had found home.
Mostly, I remember being cold.
Still, when we were deciding where to spend our family year, Squamish was a place we had already seen. We knew enough about it to say, more or less, “Why don’t we just go there?”
So we did.
One year later
The original plan was still one year.
We lived here, spent time together, and slowly built a different kind of daily life.
As the end of the year got closer, it was time to think about going back.
I asked my wife how she felt.
She was happier here.
I asked my daughter.
She liked her life here better too.
That answer stopped me.
I had always thought I was working hard for my family. I wanted them to have a good life, and providing for them was part of how I understood my role.
But here they were telling me that they were happier.
That made the decision much simpler than I expected.
We stayed.
Over the next few years, Squamish stopped feeling like the place where we had taken a one-year break. Friends appeared. Routines formed. This became where our life was.
At some point, my wife and I even began talking about retiring here someday.
I don’t know where our daughter will live when she grows up. I hope it is not too far away.
But for us, Squamish had become home.
Living here
There are obvious things to like about Squamish.
The mountains are difficult to ignore. So are the forests, the water and the amount of nature that sits right beside everyday life.
I had always liked green spaces, even when I lived in Korea. Here, I didn’t have to go very far to find them.
My pace of life changed too.
In Korea, I had spent a lot of time thinking about the future — working now so that life could be better later.
Living here made me pay more attention to whether life was good now.
Family became more central. Things slowed down.
There is also something about the feeling of Squamish that I still find hard to explain. I notice it in small interactions with people. It feels different to me from being in a larger city.
Maybe that is part of why “What brought you here?” feels like such a familiar question.
Everyone has their own answer.
This is mine.
Starting where I live
By the time I began thinking seriously about building Filgap Coffee as a small-batch roastery, I had already been living in Squamish for years.
So I never really sat down and compared Squamish with Vancouver and asked which one would be the better market for the business.
Squamish was already home.
I also noticed something much more ordinary.
I wanted freshly roasted specialty coffee that suited the kind of coffee I enjoy, and I wanted to be able to get it locally without making a special trip.
For me, that was not always easy.
Because coffee is something people buy again and again as part of ordinary life, I began wondering whether I was really the only person in town who felt that way.
Maybe there were other people here looking for something similar.
I don’t know that yet.
That is part of what Filgap has to find out.
Filgap Coffee is taking shape as a small-batch roastery here in Squamish. Starting locally gives me a chance to roast, share coffee, listen, and find out whether other people here are looking for something similar too.
I didn’t choose Squamish because I had compared it with other markets. By then, Squamish was already home.
Filgap came later, and starting here simply felt natural.
