"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

got that "the author wants a drum somewhere." Anyway, everybody wonders why that
picture of me playing drums is in the preface of the Feynman Lectures, because it doesn't
have any diagrams on it, or any other things which would make it clear. (It's true that I
like drumming, but that's another story.)
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 live 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.)