.
Lassen Peak in California, viewed from "Chaos": from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)
...So I lay awake in the dark thinking of Carleton
Watkins, blind, agéd, his mind slowly deteriorating in the State
Hospital for the Insane at Napa -- alone,
destitute, forsaken -- his wife, younger, once his assistant, having
now taken to referring to herself as his "widow"
for convenience -- the man who had invented the mammoth camera,
who had made the world aware of Yosemite Valley,
ascended the Whitney Glacier, explored the Columbia River Gorge,
given the surging power of nature at The Geysers
image life -- imagining Watkins' broken
consciousness adrift and wandering amid an endless flow of broken
images -- Shasta floating as an aethereal cloudlike
presence in the clear thin-air distance, towering, lifting
the mind to the sky -- the shattered mirror bits
of a flood of broken glass-plate memory
negatives -- the jagged night, tectonic, slowly
passing in the lamentation-drenched
ward -- a colloidal spill of illumination pooling
beneath the threshold of the visible, spilling
in from the yellowed corridor walls -- outcries
of inmates in isolation, unanswered -- the peak of Lassen
as seen from the great crack'd nevadite sea of "Chaos" crags
upon whose pyroclastic waves the untethered
mind now moves beyond present time across the blur of a vanished
past in the fractured half-light, rocking --
Mount Shasta and Whitney Glacier in California, seen from the crater (Shastina): from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)
Mount Shasta and Shastina (crater) with the Whitney Glacier between: from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)
Eastern slopes of Mount Shasta in California: from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)
Mount Shasta in California: from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)
Mount Shasta: from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)
Mount Shasta in California, viewed from Sheep Rock, 15 miles distant: from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)
Northwest slopes of Mount Shasta, viewed from Shasta Valley in California: from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)
View from Shasta Valley, California: from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)
Summit of the Sierras from Round Top, Sierra Nevadas. View from Round Top. Cloud scene looking east from Azimuth. Vertical wall just west of Azimuth in foreground. Blue Lakes on right: 1879 (Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University)
California geysers (alternative title: Devil's Canyon, geysers, looking down. Sonoma County, California. Seated figure in lower left of the photo may be Watkins himself: from the series Landmarks of Yosemite National Park and Pacific Coast views, California, c. 1865; image restoration by trialsanderrors, 2010 (Library of Congress)
Lassen Peak in California: from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)
Block of nevadite on "Chaos" in California: from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)
Lassen Peak and "Chaos" in California. Nevadite flow: from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)
