“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

At Los Alamos things were pretty tense from all the work, and there wasn’t any way to amuse yourself: there weren’t any movies, or anything like that. But I discovered some drums that the boys’ school, which had been there previously, had collected: Los Alamos was in the middle of New Mexico, where there are lots of Indian villages. So I amused myself—sometimes alone, sometimes with another guy—just making noise, playing on these drums. I didn’t know any particular rhythm, but the rhythms of the Indians were rather simple, the drums were good, and I had fun.

Sometimes I would take the drums with me into the woods at some distance, so I wouldn’t disturb anybody, and would beat them with a stick, and sing. I remember one night walking around a tree, looking at the moon, and beating the drum, making believe I was an Indian.

One day a guy came up to me and said, “Around Thanksgiving you weren’t out in the woods beating a drum, were you?”

“Yes, I was,” I said.

“Oh! Then my wife was right!” Then he told me this story:

One night he heard some drum music in the distance, and went upstairs to the other guy in the duplex house that they lived in, and the other guy heard it too. Remember, all these guys were from the East. They didn’t know anything about Indians, and they were very interested: the Indians must have been having some kind of ceremony, or something exciting, and the two men decided to go out to see what it was.

As they walked along, the music got louder as they came nearer, and they began to get nervous. They realized that the Indians probably had scouts out watching so that nobody would disturb their ceremony. So they got down on their bellies and crawled along the trail until the sound was just over the next hill, apparently. They crawled up over the hill and discovered to their surprise that it was only one Indian, doing the ceremony all by himself—dancing around a tree, beating the drum with a stick, chanting. The two guys backed away from him slowly, because they didn’t want to disturb him: He was probably setting up some kind of spell, or something.

They told their wives what they saw, and the wives said, “Oh, it must have been Feynman—he likes to beat drums.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” the men said. “Even Feynman wouldn’t be that crazy!”

So the next week they set about trying to figure out who the Indian was. There were Indians from the nearby reservation working at Los Alamos, so they asked one Indian, who was a technician in the technical area, who it could be. The Indian asked around, but none of the other Indians knew who it might be, except there was one Indian whom nobody could talk to. He was an Indian who knew his race: He had two big braids down his back and held his head high; whenever he walked anywhere he walked with dignity, alone; and nobody could talk to him. You would be afraid to go up to him and ask him anything; he had too much dignity. He was a furnace man. So nobody ever had the nerve to ask this Indian, and they decided it must have been him. (I was pleased to find that they had discovered such a typical Indian, such a wonderful Indian, that I might have been. It was quite an honor to be mistaken for this man.)

So the fella who’d been talking to me was just checking at the last minute—husbands always like to prove their wives wrong—and he found out, as husbands often do, that his wife was quite right.

I got pretty good at playing the drums, and would play them when we had parties. I didn’t know what I was doing; I just made rhythms—and I got a reputation: Everybody at Los Alamos knew I liked to play drums.

When the war was over, and we were going back to “civilization,” the people there at Los Alamos teased me that I wouldn’t be able to play drums any more because they made too much noise. And since I was trying to become a dignified professor in Ithaca, I sold the drum that I had bought sometime during my stay at Los Alamos.

The following summer I went back out to New Mexico to work on some report, and when I saw the drums again, I couldn’t stand it. I bought myself another drum, and thought, “I’ll just bring it back with me this time so I can look at it.”

That year at Cornell I had a small apartment inside a bigger house. I had the drum in there, just to look at, but one day I couldn’t quite resist: I said, “Well, I’ll just be very quiet …”

I sat on a chair and put the drum between my legs and played it with my fingers a little bit: bup, bup, bup, buddle bup. Then a little bit louder—after all, it was tempting me! I got a little bit louder and BOOM!—the telephone rang.

“Hello?”

“This is your landlady. Are you beating drums down there?”

“Yes; I’m sor—”

“It sounds so good. I wonder if I could come down and listen to it more directly?”

So from that time on the landlady would always come down when I’d start to drum. That was freedom, all right. I had a very good time from then on, beating the drums.