Every August, grown-ups race their homemade cars down the steep slopes of Mount Tabor. Cars crash. People are hurt. And someone wins. It's a blast. Look for the preliminary race around August 10, with the finals two weeks later. Or hang out with the racers at the sponsoring bar, Beulahland, 118 NE Twenty-eighth Avenue. Phone: 503-235-2794.

5. SANTA RAMPAGE

Drinking a hallucinogenic liqueur—made by soaking marijuana in rum, and called "Reindeer Fucker"—the jolly "red tide" of several hundred Santa Clauses crashes elegant holiday parties, storms through swanky restaurants, boogies in strip clubs, and generally keeps Portlands Central Precinct busy and paranoid. Most American cities have their own "Rampage," but Portlands—held the second weekend in December—is still one of the biggest and best. For more details, see "A Postcard from 1996."

6. THE EMILY DICKINSON SING-ALONG

Did you know you can sing any poem by Emily Dickinson to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas"? Well, come the Belle of Amherst's birthday—December 10—join the crowd at Cafe Lena, 2239 SE Hawthorne Boulevard, to sing the collected works of Dickinson.

7. ABANDONED TIMBERLINE HIGHWAY

From the lower end the old road to Timberline Lodge is almost impossible to find, according to Portland architect Bing Sheldon. The original route to the lodge, it's a curving scenic two-lane road that crosses stone bridges and skirts huckleberry fields. Bing says, "It really is an undiscovered treasure." Like the lodge, the road was built during the Depression but was obsolete and replaced by the end of World War II.

"It's still paved, and you can still drive on it," Bing says. "It's a wonderful engineering feat, built on a six percent grade." To find the old road, he says, start at the top, at Timberline Lodge. Driving down from the lodge, look for the first post of the ski lift and a road that heads off to the right, passing under the ski lift.

8.  FIRE DEPARTMENT RIDE-ALONGS

The Portland Fire Bureau responds to about one fire every three hours. If you can wait, you can ride along. According to a spokesman for the bureau, you must be eighteen and, yes, you can ride on the fire engine. The only thing you can't do is go into the fire. Bummer. To make your plans, call the chief at one of the fire stations.

9.  THAT'S NO LADY

Most people think Gracie Hansen is dead.

Hansen was the queen of Portland for years, the big-busted, loud-laughing queen of the Roaring Twenties Showroom at the Hoyt Hotel, a faux—Gay Nineties palace of antiques and special effects built by some of Hollywood's top set designers.

Before 1961, Gracie Hansen was a schoolteacher from Morton, Washington, who dreamed of chucking the small-town life in central Washington State and moving to Seattle. There, she wanted to stage a burlesque show at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair. "She needed fifty thousand dollars," says choreographer Roxy Leroy Neuhardt. "The story is, she found forty-nine Chinese men with a thousand dollars each and one Greek with a thousand." He says, "And they ended up serving Greek food—for whatever reason."