I am not, by any measure, a confident driver. I lived in San Francisco, a city that actively discourages car ownership, and I took full advantage of it. I drove rarely and apologetically. I took the train. I chose rideshares. I had been known to circle a block three times rather than attempt parallel parking.
So naturally, I decided to drive a camper van solo around New Zealand's North Island. It made complete sense at the time: a $450 flight from San Francisco to Auckland had appeared in my inbox like a dare, and I had accepted; five months in advance, before I had any idea what I would actually do once I got there.
What I had not fully reckoned with was that New Zealand drives on the left. Not just the left lane—the left everything. Left-side steering. Left-side blinkers. Left-hand roundabouts. Left instincts where my entire driving history had built right ones. I knew this going in, intellectually. The body takes longer to catch up than the brain.
I picked up the van, a well-outfitted Mad Campers rig, cozy and self-contained, and spent the first hour gripping the wheel with the particular white-knuckle focus of someone who knows they are one lapse of attention away from a very embarrassing international incident. By the time I reached the countryside, something in me had started to loosen. The roads were quiet. The landscape was unreasonably green. I began to think: I might actually be okay at this.
And then, on a narrow rural road outside a small town called Pirongia, something darted into my path.
Here is what I know: it was small, and it moved fast, and it startled me completely. Here is what I have since learned: New Zealand has no squirrels. They are not native here. The islands famously lack the mammals most of us grew up calling wildlife. Whatever I swerved to avoid, it was not a squirrel. But in the half-second before I yanked the wheel, my brain, operating on decades of North American muscle memory, said: squirrel.
The van caught a low stone bridge. Not dramatically, there was no Hollywood crunch, no cinematic slow-motion. The axle hit the edge of the stone, and that was enough. The van wasn't going anywhere. A farmer appeared, the way farmers do in rural places, as if summoned by the particular helplessness of a stranger in trouble, and helped me push it to the side of the road so I wasn't blocking traffic. Then I stood there, shaking, on the side of a road in rural New Zealand on a gray afternoon, and there was no Uber within a reasonable distance of where I was.
I called Mad Campers. They were kind about it, which surprised me. They arranged a tow. I stood by the road and waited, watching the clouds move in the way clouds move in a country where the weather has opinions, and I tried to breathe through the specific humiliation of having driven a camper van into a bridge on my first day.
The tow came. The van went to a garage in Pirongia. It was getting dark by the time I was sorted, and I still needed somewhere to sleep. I called hotel after hotel in that small town —there are not many—and eventually found a room. I walked a mile from the garage in the rain, dragging my bag, and checked in. The front desk person handed me a small pitcher of milk. I had no idea what it was for. I learned later it was for my morning coffee, a quiet New Zealand hospitality custom I hadn't known to expect. At the time, it just struck me as a small, inexplicable kindness at the end of a very long day.
I did not sleep particularly well.
The next morning, I called a taxi, went back to the garage, and got in the van.
That's the whole decision. I did not have a moment of clarity in the shower, a conversation with a wise local, or a journal entry that unlocked something. I just put on my shoes and went. One foot in front of the other, as my father used to say about hard things. The van was ready. The road was there. I got in.
What followed was two weeks of driving on the wrong side of the road with increasing confidence and decreasing terror. I saw the glow worm caves I had been dreaming about for years: that particular silence underground, that impossible blue light on the ceiling of the earth. I wandered Wellington on a windy afternoon, ate very good food, and talked to strangers in the way that solo travel demands and rewards. I drove through landscapes that looked as if they had been assembled by someone who had read too much Tolkien and decided to make it real.
The bridge was not the story I expected to tell about New Zealand. But it might be the truest one. Not because I overcame something dramatic, but because overcoming it was not dramatic at all. It was just the next morning, and a taxi, and getting back in the van.
The phantom squirrel, wherever it is, has no idea what it started.
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