The collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge is an engineering school staple, illustrating how sometimes things that work on paper behave differently in reality. There are a few reference videos linked at the end of this post, but the short version is that the wind set up an oscillation in the suspension bridge that caused it to rise and fall, bend and twist, until it destroyed itself.
Sometimes I wonder if the same thing is happening to me, my mind and heart achieving some resonance, oscillating between hope and despair, in a way that feels unstable. So here’s an attempt to find a song in all that.
Tacoma Narrows
Words and music by Todd Porter
(c) 2022 Todd Porter. All rights reserved.
All it takes is air
To set it in motion
35 miles an hour
a really strong breeze
Blowing through all the cables
and over the decking
The graceful suspension bridge
starting to sing.
The guys with the slide-rules watch the
waves in the pavement
They crunch all the numbers
and run all the tests
The fixes they think of
need time for the making
More time than passes
before the end
It waves and waves and waves
It falls and falls and falls
It sings and sings and sings
And it’s voice is louder
than the pavement can stand
A lone car remains
Half-way to the shoreline.
It’s driver is stumbling
Each wave of the deck.
Tubby the dog bites his
would-be rescuers
And rides in the car
right over the edge
It waves and it waves and it waves
It falls and it falls and it falls
It sings and it sings and it sings
And it’s voice is louder
than the pavement can stand.
Less than two hundred feet
under the surface
The rebar and concrete
are home to a reef
Unstoppable life
growing out of destruction
If only that life
found expression in me
It doesn’t take much
to make us unstable,
The good and the bad
and our resonant hearts.
The rising and falling and
twisting and breaking
Destroy us and heal us
and change who we are.
So let’s be
Brave
Let’s be
Strong
So we’ll be
Free
On the other side
of all we can’t comprehend.
I hear the song of life
Calling me day and night
Inviting my voice to join
In all that is being restored
References:
https://youtu.be/fHsLlTPpqeg
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940)