Tuva or Bust! Richard Feynman's Last Journey
by Ralph Leighton
The plates were being cleared from thetable, and had just begun finishing off the salad part of what had become aweekly ritual at the Feynmans'. Richard, always at the north end of the grandtable, traded witticisms with son Carl, who shared the lengthy east side of thetable with the guest. To the south sat Gweneth, making sure the food movedsmoothly around the table, and daughter Michelle occupied the west.
It was late in the summer of 1977.Michelle was about to enter the second grade at a local elementary school; Carlwas ready to begin his junior year at the high school in Pasadena where I wouldbe teaching mathematics and coaching water polo.
"Math is okay," I said,"but what I really like is geography. If I had a geography class I wouldbring in my shortwave radio and tune in the BBC or Radio Nederland. We'd playgeography games like I did with my brother: he and I would go through everyindependent country of the world. You know, the last letter of Liechtensteindetermines the first letter of the next country-Nepal, for example."
"Or Nigeria, Niger, orNicaragua," said Carl, with a hint of his mother's Yorkshire accent.
"And after exhausting the independentcountries," I continued, "we would move on to provinces. Did you knowthere's a province called 'Amazonas' in three different countries?"
"Let's see," said Carl."How about Brazil, Colombia, and Peru?"
"Not bad," I replied. "Thethird country is Venezuela, although Peru does have more of the Amazon in itthan Venezuela does."
"So you think you know every countryin the world?" interjected Richard in a familiar, mischievous voice thatusually signaled impending doom for its target.
"Uh, sure," I said, takinganother bite of salad, preparing myself for the embarrassment that was sure tofollow.
"Okay, then what ever happened toTannu Tuva?"
"Tannu what?" I said. "Inever heard of it."
"When I was a kid," Richardcontinued, "I used to collect stamps. There were some wonderful triangularand diamond-shaped stamps that came from a place called 'Tannu Tuva.' "
I became suspicious. My brother Alan, astamp collector, had made a fool out of me dozens of times when we played"Islands of the World." He would rattle off some exotic sounding namelike "Aitutaki," and when I challenged him on it he would pull out hisstamp catalog and show me a few stamps from the place. So I stopped challenginghim, and he grew bolder and bolder, winning game after game. Finally I caughthim on "Aknaki," supposedly part of a tiny atoll in the South Pacific,after dimly recalling that the week before he had claimed it was a river inMauritania. So I straightened up in my chair a bit and said, "Sir, there isno such country.'
"Sure there is," said Richard."In the 1930s it was a purple splotch on the map near Outer Mongolia, andI've never heard anything about it ever since."
Had I stopped and thought a moment, Iwould have realized that Richard's favorite trick was to say somethingunbelievable that turns out to be true. Instead, I tightened the noose that hadjust been placed around my neck: "The only countries near Outer Mongoliaare China and the Soviet Union, I said, boldly. "I can show you on themap."
I grabbed my last bite of salad as we allgot up from the table and proceeded into the living room to Richard's favoritebook, the Encyclopedia Britannica. In the last volume there was an atlas. Weopened it to a map of Asia.
"See?" I said. "There'snothing here but the USSR, Mongolia, and China. This 'Tannu Tuva' must have beensomewhere else."
"Oh, look!" said Carl."Tuvinskaya ASSR. It's bordered on the south by the Tannu-OlaMountains."
Sure enough, occupying a notch northwestof Mongolia was a territory that could well once have had the name Tannu Tuva. Ithought, I've been had by a stamp collector again!
"Look at this," remarkedRichard. "The capital is spelled K-Y-Z-Y-L."
"That's crazy," I said."There's not a legitimate vowel anywhere!"
"We must go there, said Gweneth.
"Yeah!" exclaimed Richard."A place that's spelled K-Y-Z-Y-L has just got to be interesting!"
Richard and I grinned at each other andshook hands.