Walking Over A Steel Bridge

Over the expanse of steel you walk without hesitation, carrying yourself from one island to the next, heading home after a long day of exhausting work, your feet can barely keep up with your heart's excitement. The autumn sunlight glimmers off the beams of metal as if trying to find a surface to turn warm, or at least pretend it can in this swiftly freezing season. Even the once raging river below will soon be a crawling mass of ice impotent against the wind's desire. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the origin of the word bridge to an Old English word brycg, of the same meaning, derived from a hypothetical Proto-Germanic root brugjō. The first bridges were made by nature itself — as simple as a log fallen across a stream or stones in the river. The first bridges made by humans were probably spans of cut wooden logs or planks and eventually stones, using a simple support and crossbeam arrangement. Some early Americans used trees or bamboo poles to cross small caverns or wells to get from one place to another. A common form of lashing sticks, logs, and deciduous branches together involved the use of long reeds or other harvested fibers woven together to form a connective rope capable of binding and holding together the materials used in early bridges. The Arkadiko Bridge is one of four Mycenaean corbel arch bridges part of a former network of roads, designed to accommodate chariots, between Tiryns to Epidauros in the Peloponnese, in Greece. Dating to the Greek Bronze Age (13th century BC), it is one of the oldest arch bridges still in existence and use. Several intact arched stone bridges from the Hellenistic era can be found in the Peloponnese in southern Greece. This sound uses the following file from Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/people/klankbeeld/sounds/127255/