Found her in a barn outside Estacada, buried under a tarp and thirty years of someone else's abandoned projects. A 1978 XS650, seized engine, mouse nest in the airbox, seat foam that crumbled when you looked at it wrong. The old guy wanted four hundred bucks and seemed surprised I said yes. His wife seemed relieved. I loaded it into my buddy's truck and started what would become a two-year conversation between me and a machine that did not want to cooperate.
First year was just getting it to run. Rebuilt the top end on my apartment balcony in Southeast because I didn't have a garage yet - my neighbors loved that, obviously. Soaked the carbs in Pine-Sol for a week because the internet said it works and it actually does. Found an NOS wiring harness on eBay from a guy in Ohio who wrote me a handwritten note saying "treat her well." I framed that note. It's on my shop wall now next to the original title.
Second year was making it mine. New tank from a swap meet in Salem, spokes I laced myself after watching about forty YouTube videos and getting it wrong three times, a seat pan I shaped from aluminum on a sandbag with a mallet. Every single bolt on this bike has been in my hands at least twice. When people at the Thursday night bike meetup on Hawthorne ask if it's a cafe or a tracker or a brat, I just say it's an XS. It doesn't need a genre. It's two years of weekends and skinned knuckles and that specific joy of making something exist that didn't exist before. Portland's full of makers and builders and people who do things the hard way on purpose. This bike is my version of that.