Forty-Five Snowy I

Forty-five Snowy I UA place that)s spelled K-Y-Z by Ralph Leighton Y-L has just got to be interesting. )) At a dinner-table conversation in 1977 about and beginning algebra, and then back to coach T annu T uva (known to all serious stamp collectors for ing water polo. Most weekends included more its wonder/ul triangular and diamond-shaped stamps) coaching, bur two welcome exceptions came in Ralph Leighton and Richard Feynman impetuously November, when Richard and I went to San resolved to go there because of its capital's name ("A Francisco to drum for a small ballet company The author furnished place that's spelled K- Y-Z-Y-L has just got to be whose home was the Elks Lodge near Union his car with a person· interesting," said Feynman.) Over the next decade, Square. alized license plate until Feymnan's death in 1988. the two pursued their The year before, we had composed and hoping to attract the attention of Tuvan goal, sometimeJ deJultorily but always with enthusiasm. performed the music for Cycles of Superstition , immigrants, or at Leighton, who also collaborated with the Nobel a ballet by the same company. Our "music" least friendly stamp prizewinning physicist on two earlier bookJ, "Surely consisted entirely of drumming, which was collectors. Here Feynman pretends to You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" and What Do You perfectly adequate as far as Richard was con push the car a few Care What Other People Think?, haJ now written cerned. He regarded conventional music and feet along the road to Tuva or Bust! Richard Feynman's Last Journey, its chords and melodies as "drumming with Tuva. describing their attempts to penetrate the Cold War notes"-an unnecessary complication. bureaucracy rtnd make their way to the center of Asia. Cyefes of Superstition had been a great success: A chapter of the book (© Ralph Leighton) is excerpted the audience of perhaps 30 applauded enthusias here with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & tically. This year the production was called The Company. The book is available in bookstores or from Ivory Merchant. Our job was to portray the the publisher via the coupon on the inside back cover. interaction of colonial and native cultures in Leighton grew up around Caltech, where his father, Africa, again entirely through drumming. Robert Leighton, has been a member of the physics Rehearsals were Friday evening and Saturday faculty since 1947. Ralph met Feynman at the age of evening, with performances the following week one, but their friendship really began when he was in end. During our free time on Saturday we high school rtnd the two discovered a mutual passion for walked the streets of San Francisco. Our conver drumming. Out of those years of drumming came sation hit upon Tuva. "Let's go over to the San Feynman'J recorded JtorieJ and Jome zany adventures Francisco library," suggested Richard. "It oughta like this one. Just before E&S went to press, Leighton be pretty good." reported that this summer he had finally reached T uva, Half an hour later we reached the Civic where he installed a plaque in Feynman's memory. Center, a collection of European-style buildings built around a large square lined with sycamores The school year washed over me, leaving hacked off to resemble the marronier trees found barely a moment to breathe: a typical day began all over France. The library faced the City Hall, with coaching the water polo team at 6 a.m., where the United Nations had convened for the followed by five classes of remedial arithmetic first time, in 1945. As we made our way up the Engineering & Science/Summer 1991 31 hardly enoug h to account for the relatives and friends of the cast. Depressed at the sight of so many vacant chairs, I sa id , "This reminds me of eating in an empty res cauranr "If the food is good, what does it matter?" replied Richard. "Ju SC do your bese. Remember what we're doing: we're composing and perform ing music for a ballet, man! " It was an unusual thing for a professor of physics and a high school math teacher to be doing, but we were doing it, and Richard loved rhae. Bur he abhorred Samuel J ohnson's observa tion about a dog walki ng on its hind legs-"Ir is not done well , but you are surprised to find it done at aJl "-so it was nor mentioned in rhe program that the drummers had other profess ions. A month later, at Christmas, the predictable pattern in my family of presenting phonog raph record s to each mher was broken by my brother Alan, who gave me some of dle wonderful tri angular and diamond-shaped stamps fro m the wide Stone stairway , Richard p roposed a chal 19 30s rhar Richard had ralked abour. They lenge: to fin d a picture of Tuva in this li brary. showed exci ti ng scenes of horsemen at full gallop, When we looked duough rhe card caralog, we kneeling archers taking aim, wrestlers inter reali zed we'd be Iud,!, co find anyrhing ar all on locked in strugg le, hunters shooting their quarry Tuva. There was no heading for "Tannu Tuva," at close range (after all , they were pos tage "Tuva," or "Tuvinskaya ASSR. " There was a stamps!), and a wide variety of wil d and domes section on Central As ia, but it feat ured places ticated animals, from foxes and sables to yaks, Such a great li ke Tashkent and Samarkand. camels, and reindeer. Such great variety in so variety in so small Richard wem off into (he stac ks co look at (he sma ll a country seemed impossible. Were the a country seemed books on "Siberia----descriprion and travel," while scenes in these postage stamps based on fact or I wandered around the reference section. I even fa ntasy? Around the border of several stamps impossible, Were tuall y hir upon rhe 1953 edirion of rhe G reat were strange designs- festival mas ks of some the scenes in these Soviet Encyclopedia and fou nd an acride on Kyzyl. sort-and the words ;' Posta Touva," spelled as In rhe middle of rhe page was a black-and -whire if the territory had once been ruled by France. postage stamps phocograph- a picture of Tuva!- which showed During Christmas vaca tion I went to the based on fact or the "Dam Sovierov," Tuva's new govern ment UCLA library and d iscovered Unknown Mongolia bui lding. The architecture was not unlike that of (London, 1913) by rhe English explorer Douglas fantasy? rhe Ciry Hall oursid e. A lone aucomobi le srood Carruthers (in which Tuva is referred to as "(he conspicuously in front, cas ting no shadow- it basin of the Upper Yenisei" and its inhabitants as seemed [Q have been hand-painted into the "rhe U ri ankhai"), and half a dozen ocher books phocograph. about Tuva, all of which J borrowed. Apart fro m Excired, I went looking for Richard. H e was Unknown lvIongoLia, all the books were in Russ ian, sti ll in "Siberia--description and travel," sitting a language reputed to be twice as hard as Ger on the floo r, reading a book called Road to man. But because mathematical formulas con Oblivion. The riri e looked promising. T he rain Greek Ierrers, and rhe G reek alphaber author, Vladimir Zenzinov, had been sent intO form ed the basis for the Russian alphabet, exil e by the Czar- not once, not twice, but duee Richard was able to make alit some of the times. The first tWO times he managed to escape, captions. I bought a pocket Russi an-English so the third time, the government was deter dictionary and looked up words one by one. mined to put him in a place so isolated he would One of rhe UCLA library books showed rhe never find his way out. Even though that place first govern ment building-a log cabin- with turned out not to be Tuva, Richard was captivat a beautiful white yurt next to it. There were ed by rhe scory. inevitable jokes about the presiden( ofTuva The followi ng weekend we performed The sleeping in the "W hite Yurt." Ivory M erchant to an audience of about 15- Anorher book had several picrures of Kyzyl. 32 Engineering & Science/Summer 1991 The new government building was already familiar to us. Other p hotographs showed rhe regional Party headquarters, a POSt office, and a hotel. Because the p hotographs were taken from d ifferent locations and included more chan one building, we were able to piece together a crude map of dowllwwn Kyzyl. In none of [he photo g raphs did we see more than one automobile. At the very least, One picture caught my interest only much a stamp collector later: Shkola No.2. After deducing that chere must be at least two schools in Kyzy l, I reali zed might recognize that here was a definite place in Tuva I could the spelling and write to: I'm a teacher, so why not write to a honk if he loved teacher in Tuva and ask how I can visit? As much fun as it was to find out more about T uva, Tuvan postage our real goal was (0 get co Kyzyl, and so far we stamps. hadn't done anything about that. I contacted Mary Fleming Zirin (the wife of Caltech Professor of Astrophysics Hal Zirin), whom 1 had bummed rides off of when I was a student at UCLA, where she was working on her PhD in Russian.

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