August 24, 1943

Vida, Oregon
8/24/43

Dear Folks,
Well we are out on the civilized end of the trail. We finished our work back in the hills today and moved back here too. A big day. I’m tired and not in a letter writing mood. There are 4 days left this week and we have one day’s work on surveying and a day breaking camp and getting back to Elton. We have gotten on the good side of our boss and he is going to let us leave here Fri. noon with the truck and stop over in Eugene Fri. nite and get back to Elkton Sat. evening. Not bad? He’s been pretty good to us since we got to know each other. We have tomorrow off cause we worked on Sunday while we were up in the mountains. Maybe I’ll feel like adding something tomorrow before they take the mail into Vida. We are about 3 miles from Vida, it’s a 1 store and post office town.
That’s quite a thing to find out I have relations out here. But I won’t have any chance to see if I can find them. You see the first time we came up and found our road closed it was from the Sweet Home side but this time we came up from the south side by trail. Our camp up in the hills here was about 30 miles from Sweet Home. (south east of it) We don’t go near Sweet Home on the way back, cause there is a row of mountains between Sweet Home and our camp and road. We go back through Eugene and that is the only way to get thro from here, through Eugene. So as I say I’ll probably never see Sweet Home again. I suspect that if I had had a chance I would have tried to look up those folks. Well, I’m going to bed.
Good night
Love Bernard.

Now it’s Wed. morning! It’s a bright sunshiny morning and I’m not so sleepy as I was last night.
Al and I and the cook (Jim Ricks) are the only ones left in the camp today. We get (Al and I) today off. While the rest work then we will work tomorrow while the others lay off. All we have to do is set some corners and that is only a 2 or 3 man job and they only have 2 compasses and 3 crews of 2 or 3 each so Al and I wait till tomorrow to do ours.
We three are going in to town (Vida) this morning to get a few groceries and the mail. One doesn’t appreciate daily mail till you are out of reach of it.
I don’t know what I’ll be doing at Elkton yet. Probably carpenter work. I have a sort of carpenter reputation now and I like it pretty well. I really like the shop work best but I don’t think there is much of that anymore.
I get the idea from you letters that threshing has been sort of a long drawn out job this year. Maybe that has kept you from working too hard at it. I also get the idea that the yield isn’t so hot this year. And the corn getting blown over isn’t good. I hope it stands up good enough so you can get a picker through some of it.
Well, we’re going to town pretty soon [I] guess. I’ll sign off
Yours Bernard