Rory Gibson: I thought I was going to die

There have been three times in Rory Gibson’s life where he thought he had reached the end.

I’ve lived through three existential threats.

When I was in Grade 8 at boarding school you had to run a gauntlet past the senior dormitories to get to the tuckshop.

One day, on my way to get a Jelly Tip ice cream, I was ambushed by the First XV. They ordered me to strip down to my grundies then tied me crucifixion-style to the wire mesh fence surrounding the tennis courts. Then they took it in turns to kick the footy into the fence pressing into my bare back. It hurt a lot, and I thought I was going to die.

But I survived, only to be thrust straight into the Cold War. The world was bristling with intercontinental nukes and apparently some vodka-crazed Russian was poised to push the button that would send us all to oblivion.

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This was in the early years of my journalism career and as a result of being in a newsroom piled high with Telex cables ominously reporting the end was nigh, I thought I was going to die.

The third time I stared into the abyss, as did most of the world’s population, was at the end of the last millennium when the spectre of the Y2K bug was going to make all the computers go rogue.

The way the IT consultants (who all retired wealthy on 1/1/2000) told it, everything from our alarm clocks to the space station were going to find a way to do us harm. I had nightmares about my car deliberately driving off a cliff with me in it, and I thought I was going to die.

U on Sunday columnist Rory Gibson.

Now I’m being told the weather is going to kill us. I was contemplating this new threat to my existence while hiking through the valleys of the Milford Track in New Zealand two weeks ago. Valleys formed by retreating glaciers. Glaciers that retreated long before humans learned how to make fire. I wondered what caused the global warming then?

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that the people who lived through an actual existential threat - that generation who had to deal with World War II - have remained rather sanguine throughout all that has followed since.

That tells you something.