FIXATIONS : Travel Plan Put Tuva on Bowers Exec’s Map : Museum official was key in helping adventurers in their scheme to visit a city where the people live in yurts.

Bowers Museum director Peter Keller may have his museum booked until 1995, having traveled to China and other far climes to oversee every detail of his scheduled exhibits, but I’ll bet he doesn’t know he’s going to have a yurt full of Tuvans on his lawn.

That’s just the sort of fallout Keller has to expect after getting involved in one of the greatest fixations of modern times, that of the late renowned physicist Richard Feynman and his friend Ralph Leighton to visit Tuva, a remote Asian former republic of the Soviet Union, where some nomadic folks still live in willow and wool tents called yurts.

Feynman was a Nobel laureate (an honor he disdained), a brilliant, iconoclastic educator, and the person on the Rogers Commission who used a C-clamp and a cup of ice water to solve the mystery of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.

He also was a self-described “curious character” who lived life as a constant adventure, throwing himself wholeheartedly into everything from ethnic drumming to lock-picking, a craft he perfected on the “top secret” safes and files at Los Alamos to amuse himself while working on the atomic bomb in the ‘40s. Many of his adventures are recounted in the books “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” and “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” and make great reading.

While amusing themselves with geographical trivia one evening in 1977, Feynman stumped Leighton by mentioning Tuva, a country he remembered from its exotic postage stamps in the ‘30s. They looked it up on a map, and immediately determined that any place where the capital city, Kyzyl, had no proper vowels needed to be visited.

In the decade that followed the pair tried numerous means to gain access to Tuva, which, being one of the most remote parts of the slowly thawing Soviet Union, proved about as easy as getting an LP record into a CD player. Even information on Tuva was slight; they reveled in every footnote turned up in libraries, and got a license plate mysteriously misspelled “TOUVA” in the hopes a transplanted Tuvan would spot it.

They learned as much of the language as they could, which, when translated, had a bewildering sentence structure, as in: “I Tuva-to go-to-like-would I.” They sent that message to a number of Tuvan institutions, and found every legitimate avenue of travel blocked by Soviet bureaucracy.

It was with their most elaborate scheme to get to Tuva that they approached Keller, who was then associate director of public programs at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.

Seated in his spacious new digs at the Bowers (which reopens in October after a major expansion) Keller recalled, “I was sitting in my office one day in Los Angeles and unannounced Richard Feynman comes to the door. I’d loved his book, and to have him show up at my doorstep was really extraordinary.

“He said, ‘Have you ever heard of Tuva?’ And no, I hadn’t. He told me about it and explained how much he and Ralph Leighton wanted to go there. Then he told me about this idea they had to bring over a major traveling exhibition of the Soviets on a subject that includes Tuva, and as part of the protocol he and Ralph would have an expedition to Tuva.”

Two neophytes with tourism as an ulterior motive--who wondered themselves if they were “clowns or con men” according to Leighton--usually aren’t the driving force behind major museum exhibits, but Keller liked their idea and went to work on it. He may have been receptive to them because he’s a tad fixated himself, having been fascinated with gemstones and anthropology since he was a child and his dad took him hunting for arrowheads and mineral deposits.

“I went to college for nine years to be a geologist so I’d never have to sit in an office in a big city, and here I am,” Keller said with a laugh, though he has had his share of out-of-office experiences. Studying gem deposits, he’s camped in the wilder parts of Thailand, Brazil, Tanzania, rural China and other lands.

The full account of the Tuva tale -- with a chapter called “The Keller Accord” no less--is told by Leighton in his book (published last year), “Tuva or Bust--Richard Feynman’s Final Journey” (Leighton collaborated on the other two Feynman books), which also includes a nifty record of Tuvan throat singing, a not altogether pleasant ability of traditional Tuvan vocalists to sing two notes at a time.

Leighton had seen a Soviet exhibit containing Tuvan artifacts in a Swedish museum, which led to the idea for a similar one in the United States. They were able to get Keller a copy of the Soviet’s protocol of its requirements for the exhibition, so that when Keller traveled to Moscow he was able to present them with a protocol that matched theirs word for word, saving months of wrangling.

What Keller negotiated to bring over, and did in early 1989, was “Nomads: Masters of the Eurasian Steppe,” by far the largest Soviet exhibition ever to tour the United States. “It had some 1,500 objects,” Keller said, “when usually 200 or 300 objects is considered a major exhibition. And the effects of that exhibition keep snowballing.”

For example, the exhibition was accompanied by an international symposium, which led to Chinese contacts for Keller that have resulted in planned Bowers exhibits of jade and the treasures of the Forbidden City. Not bad for something that’s the direct result of a couple of guys’ mischievous whim to visit a town without vowels.

“The Nomads exhibition wouldn’t have come without them,” Keller said, “We wouldn’t have even known about it, and the bureaucracy we’d have had to go through by the standard channels would have been overwhelming. It was strictly thanks to Richard Feynman and Ralph Leighton.”

Keller was particularly impressed by the way Feynman followed through, involving himself in the museum staff meetings and never throwing his name and stature around.

“He was just a straightforward guy. This was while he was in the headlines with the Rogers Commission, and he didn’t even talk about that very much. He was so unassuming and so natural about what he did. He just went in there, looked at things in the simplest terms and put it on the line. I think what he did with the O-rings and the glass of ice water was typical of that. (Feynman used a basic demonstration to show that the shuttle’s vital O-rings failed in cold temperatures.) He opened me up a great deal. He was so observant and inquisitive and challenging about everything. Things anyone else would take for granted, he was always going ‘why?’ or ‘how?’ ”

“That was Feynman’s nature,” said Leighton, reached by phone at his Montebello home. “Whenever he took on a role, he wanted to do it the best he could, sort of like an actor who really studies a part and becomes the part. He always brought his full enthusiasm to a thing.

“In listening to Feynman’s stories, gradually I caught on that the theme that goes through them was that life is full of adventures which you can make for yourself. You can take the initiative and go out and explore and have these adventures, and if you stay with something and pursue it long enough it will usually uncover something unexpected and interesting. That’s what I was lucky enough to experience with the Tuva adventure.”

The sad part to that adventure was that Feynman died of abdominal cancer four days before the Soviets finally extended their invitation to Feynman and Leighton to visit Tuva. Leighton went, but said it was a bittersweet experience.

“The journey may be more important than the goal, but once in a while it’s nice to enjoy the fruits of your labors too. I feel terribly disappointed that we got so close. But then that first trip was so staged, in what we were allowed to see by the government, that in a way it was a relief that Feynman didn’t have to endure it. But also, knowing him, if he’d been there he probably could have charmed the hosts into allowing us to see more.”

Leighton did make a second visit last year, which he described as “the trip of our dreams, the Tuva of the postage stamps.” Along with drinking thickly curded fermented milk with nomads in a yurt, he mounted a plaque to Feynman’s memory next to a monument in Kyzyl marking the center of Asia, a specific destination of Feynman’s. The president of Tuva even officiated at the ceremony, one of his last official acts, as he was deposed after siding with the leaders of the unsuccessful coup against Mikhail S. Gorbachev that took place during Leighton’s trip.

Feynman’s unfinished Odyssey continues to take on new chapters. An organization he and Leighton founded called Friends of Tuva now has more than 1,000 active members. It is Leighton’s goal to bring a team of throat-singing Tuvan horsemen to the next Rose Parade and to have them perform a series of concerts in their yurt.

“Then just the other day a woman called me because she suffers from chemical hypersensitivity and wants to live in a natural yurt. I got this just as I was sending off a fax for the arrangement for having this yurt sent over for the concerts. So now I have a customer for it when we’re done. These amazing things are still happening. I’m Tuva central here,” Leighton said.

He hasn’t gotten around to mentioning to Keller yet that the Bowers Museum is one of his intended tour stops, “but I have the feeling Keller’s the kind of guy who will go for it. He got caught up in the spirit of things pretty well.”