At the comer of SW Eighteenth Avenue and Taylor—directly behind the PGE Park Scoreboard—video director Gray Mayo says you can kayak through the storm sewers downtown. By lowering your kayak through a manhole at that spot, you can navigate now buried Tanner Creek all the way to the Willamette River. Looking at the manhole covers, he warns, "The S means human waste. The W means storm water. I'm pretty sure ..."

The most I can ever do is to write things down. To remember them. The details. To honor them in some way. This book is not Portland, Oregon. At best, it's a series of moments with interesting people. This year will take me to England, Scotland, France, Italy, and Spain, plus forty American and Canadian cities, but I always come home to Portland.

If this is love or inertia, I don't know, but my friends are here. All my stuff is here. I moved to Portland in 1980 because it rains a lot. I moved from a desert town called Burbank, Washington, where my grandparents had a small farm. I moved

to Portland because it's dark and wet, and all my friends from high school moved to Seattle. Because I wanted to meet new people. To hear new stories. That's my job now, to assemble and reassemble the stories I hear until I can call them mine.

I got my wish. What I traded my tonsils for.

It only seems right to end this book with one of my favorite stories:

Lady Elaine Peacock was elected the twenty-ninth empress of the Imperial Sovereign Rose Court in 1987.

As beautiful as Dionne Warwick in her prime, Lady Elaine (aka Elwood Johnson) founded "Peacock in the Park," an annual drag show in the Washington Park Amphitheater. It's still held the last Sunday in June, supposedly the driest day of the year in Portland, and attracts a sellout crowd of thousands.

In 1988, when Lady Elaine was to relinquish her crown to a new empress, she and her mother, Audria M. Edwards, did a mother-and-son, song-and-dance production number in matching gowns.

According to Walter Cole (aka Darcelle XV), this was onstage in the Egyptian Ballroom of the Masonic Temple, now part of the art museum at 1219 SW Park Avenue. There, Walter says Audria collapsed at the end of the number and was rushed to the hospital. She died of a heart attack, while her son was still performing. "It was overwhelming," Walter says. "The atmosphere was totally heavy. We knew she was dead, but Peacock was determined to go on. She lasted right through to the end."

So much of this book isn't part of Portland's official history, but it should be.

Elwood Johnson died of AIDS in 1993, but the Audria M. Edwards Scholarship Fund that he established is still supported by his other legacy, the annual "Peacock in the Park" show. The last Sunday each June, the show still starts at 3:30 p.m.