Diving Jade Cove & the Conscious Unconscious
Exploring the Jungian waters of Big Sur's Jade Cove, and the Nephrite Deep Green
By Ryan Masters
“Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.”
Twenty feet beneath the sea.
I skimmed the bottom of the cove, probing a mosaic of algae, sponges, limpets, and barnacles. My focus skittered like a ravenous crab, picking its way across a vast scatter of storm-tossed stones. It poked its head down holes and peered through a swaying curtain of kelp stalk and rockweed.
Seeking, seeking, seeking the smooth and lustrous wink of treasure . . . nephrite jade.
But for the ticks and pings and creaks inside my skull, it was silent down here. I kicked past an overhang. A fat lingcod lurked in the shadows. Intriguing, but not jade. My brain chugged oxygen from my lungs. Just a few more seconds and I would be forced to resurface for air.
A disquieting alarm rang deep within one of the older functions of my brain. It was not responding to any discernible motion or a sound—simply to a presence. Something was behind me. Cautiously, I turned. I was face-to-face with an adult bull elephant seal.
Its colossal proboscis drooped grotesquely— alien and phallic. I could reach out and touch the white scar and whiskers on this huge snout, the bulges and folds of its furrowed skin. Above the stunning nose, two wet-black eyes fixed on mine. Behind these eyes hovered a body nearly the size of a Volkswagen Bug.
To Carl Jung, consciousness was dry land. To dive into the ocean and swim away from shore is to enter the personal unconscious—a place ruled by impulsive cross currents, wishes, waves of subliminal perceptions. Memories like fish swim through this water in the shape of dreams, fantasies, chance associations, or even direct recall. Beyond that, the ocean drops away into the benthic weirdness of the collective unconscious—an undefinable abyss where our primordial archetypes lurk like leviathans.
No one will ever accuse me of neglecting my dark side. I’ve always found light brightest in the dark. And there is joy in chaos—even when celestial design degenerates into holy mess. That, of course, is the nature of chaos—to form and deform.
The elephant seal triggered my unconscious and my mind had a very difficult time deciding whether I was dreaming or not.
Dream or no dream, I seriously misjudged the credibility of the spearfisher who warned me about an elephant seal.
This is what you get, I told myself. Here before you is the face of your own stubborn, foolish, impulsive, addict self. And it is very unhappy with you.
I frantically swam for the surface. As I gasped air, the seal’s massive head and torso erupted from the water a few feet away. It reeled back aggressively, revealing a mouthful of white daggers, and vented an extraordinary roar. I thrashed wildly away from the pissed-off creature, desperate to escape its territory. It lowered itself back into the water and sailed after me, its huge cranium cleaving the water like a surface torpedo.
When I reached the shore I flopped over on to my hands and knees and scrabbled up the sharp stones, cutting my hands and dropping my weight belt as I went.
When I judged I was a safe distance up the beach, I turned to see if he was following. He lurked at the water’s edge, apparently satisfied with my utter submission to its virility and power. Once again, it reeled back and let loose a long, victorious roar.
With that settled, he swam out to the middle of the cove and sunned himself on the surface, king of all he surveyed.
“Told you there was an elephant seal in there,” laughed the spear-fisher from above. He peeled an orange atop a boulder of serpentine.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”
In 2003, Don Wobber and I made the 65-mile drive south from Monterey to Big Sur’s Jade Cove in a mini-van full of dive gear.
This wisecracking, youthful 76-year-old man and I had become fast friends. A mutual love of poetry and the ocean brought us together, but a series of dive articles I’d written for the Monterey County Herald has kept us together on assignment. Among many adventures, we’d spearfished the Peninsula, explored a forgotten shipwreck off Pebble Beach, flirted with the void of the Carmel Trench, and blissed out on leopard sharks at Point Lobos.
Jade Cove, however, is more than just another dive spot.
In local circles, Wobber’s adventures at Jade Cove are the stuff of legend. In the old days, Don floated huge jade boulders off the sea floor using inflatable pontoon bags and nets of wire mesh. His 1975 book, Jade Beneath the Sea, recounts his odyssey to wrangle a 9,000-pound monolith from the depths and the ensuing legal fight to keep it. The stone now resides at the Oakland Museum.
Located just south of Plaskett Creek, Jade Cove is home to the only underwater concentration of quality Nephrite jade in the world. It’s actually a series of three coves that act as reservoirs for storm-washed fragments of jade torn from the veins that run through the littoral zone offshore.
When Wobber was introduced to the place by Beatnik friends in the 1950s, its promise of treasures, both literal and figurative, consumed him. To pursue his obsession, he abandoned a successful but unsatisfying career among the melancholy shadows of San Francisco’s Financial District—and his first wife. Fond of quoting Jung, he once explained this decision to me by saying, “Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to be able to go on living.”
Wobber moved to Pacific Grove on the Monterey Peninsula and reinvented himself. He became a marine biologist, a fearless adventurer, and, according to National Geographic, one of the “best of the world’s contemporary jade sculptors.”
His work is a smooth, languid reflection of the stone itself and the sea from which it came. Each sculpture is a study in strength, patience and meditation. After wrestling the material from the sea, he painstakingly wore the stone down with diamond-impregnated metal, carborundum, and six different grades of silicate carbide sandpaper.
By subtracting the smooth material grain by grain, he accentuated its natural sea-worn line until it glowed with astonishing depth. Wobber’s sculptures are gorgeous, tactile creations that resemble miles of cold, green ocean compressed into a few feet, or even a few inches. They are impossible to keep your hands off.
Littered with jade sculptures of all shapes and sizes, his backyard in Pacific Grove was a testament to this skill and passion. It was also, in some way, the realization of his personal unconscious. Of course, his obsession has not been without cost. “I’m jade rich, but cash-poor,” he frequently laughs.
We decided to dive the South Cove. Both the Chinese and the Maori associate jade with longevity, toughness, and spirituality. Nephrite jade is considered the toughest stone in the world. Neolithic tools made of the stuff rest in museums around the world today, as perfect and whole and useful as the day they were formed. Wobber may have been 76 years old, but he still insisted on carrying 100 pounds of scuba gear down the South Cove’s 180-foot marine terrace. He was a fairly sure-footed old goat, but I kept an eye on him just the same.
It’s said that the Greek God Poseidon left the ocean in the form of a horse to fornicate with the Gorgon Medusa and sire winged Pegasus. —A dubious duty to be sure. Don himself creaked and tilted on the hike down Jade Cove’s steep trail. Bow-legged, he clomped clumsily into the waves wearing his ancient horse collar buoyancy compensator.
But once the old man slipped beneath the water’s surface, he was ageless. Underwater, decades jettisoned from his body and there was only his weightless soul. As he gracefully kicked away from shore, I thought of relieved Poseidon returning home to wash away the snake oil.
Together, we swam out to the wash rock before parting ways. Wobber disappeared into the ether. Hunting jade is, by nature, a solitary pursuit, but I periodically heard the tink-tink-tink of Don’s pry bar testing stone somewhere nearby.
There was a fairly strong swell that day and the surge drew me back and forth across the sea floor. Swimming with the respiration of the ocean is like breathing with God—inhale, exhale, inhale . . . when you feel its force you simply relax; when it abates, you kick. Sometimes hunting for jade feels like a song and on days like our, when was happy just to be in the water, I found the best pieces. The ocean offered up a beautiful, heart-shaped chunk of botryoidal or bubble jade—its smooth clumps reminded me of the back of some heavenly crocodile.
Pure jade, incidentally, is white. Any other color, including green, is the result of impurities. This makes sense to me. I’ve always found pure rather boring.
Wobber was not to be outdone. He was never outdone at Jade Cove. When we reconvened on the beach, he showed me his haul. Even after all his decades of collecting jade, his eyes still shone with the thrill of the hunt. You can feel the spiritual connection he shares with every piece he finds. The large, gorgeous stone he has found on our day togeth was just as meaningful to him as the first one he found 50 years before:
Jade, real jade!
Maoris, Aztecs, Chinese, Sumerians, Babylonians: back, back into the whorls of prehistory, to the dawn of man.
There did not seem to be a time when jade was not revered as a mystical, religious symbol. And now, I found a very special piece carved by centuries of sea abrasion that had taken on a special meaning for me.
This meaning—the jade, the coast, the sea—became an invisible vortex that tugged at me, pulling at me through feeling and intellect, revealing through my diving some undeniable, deeper, inevitable meaning.
(from Jade Beneath the Sea, Don Wobber)
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
Bad things happen in life. Sometimes in clumps. In 2007, one of my best friends killed himself. My father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. My ex-wife moved to South Carolina with my young son. I spent 28 days addressing some bad habits that resurfaced partly as a response to these events.
I decided to dive Jade Cove.
Scuba Diving Magazine hired me and my partner, an underwater photographer named Jeff Wildermuth, to explore the inside of a cave at the heart of Jade Cove.
Wildermuth’s camera is worth more than my car. Actually, it’s worth more than three of my cars. The best diver I know, Jeff has logged bottom time at many of the world’s deepest and most challenging sites, including the preposterously dangerous Andrea Doria. The man’s hard to impress.
On this occasion, he was very impressed. We were 50 yards offshore inside a large wash rock that dominates the middle of the South Cove. We entered the cave through a narrow gap at the inshore base of the rock. One wall of the cave is a large vein of pure, naturally polished green jade.
Jeff and I have worked together all over California. We were two of the only divers allowed to explore what remains of Queen Anne’s Revenge, Blackbeard’s ship, in North Carolina.
When I say we work together, what I mean is he works and I pose next to whatever he is shooting and then scribble a few paragraphs to accompany his photos.
I posed underwater, deep inside a rock, running my hand across the hidden heart of jade. Jeff’s camera flash emit bursts of light inside the cave, blinding me and throwing my shadow against the surreal green canvas again and again and again.
“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.”
By 2013, Don Wobber had been sick for some time. A few years before, he’d suffered a serious fall down the trail to Jade Cove. The accident nearly scalped him. It also effectively ended the diving portion of his life. However, he’d continued to groom his sculptures and work on his new book. Eventually even those pursuits were too much for him.
I brought my guitar over to Don’s and played him some songs. He nursed a glass of Sierra Nevada beer. His 85-year-old body had finally given out, but his eyes were still as alive as ever. Speaking had become difficult, but when he did talk, he cracked jokes.
Don insisted on walking me out to my car. He brushed off the nurse’s assistance and shuffled his rickety-looking walker out into the sun with me. He made it as far as the end of the walkway before tiring and put a hand on one of his jade sculptures to support himself.
“Goodbye, Don,” I said.
“I’ll see ya around.”
There was more I wanted to say; more that I wanted to say to my own father; more that I wanted to tell my friend before he took his life; more that I must find the courage to say to my son someday.
But that’s where I left Don, surrounded by a menagerie of otherworldly jade—one hand planted on his dreams.
“The shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still drags behind him. Carefully amputated, it becomes the healing serpent of the mysteries.”
Don once told me it’s more important to be whole than good. He didn’t need to add that it isn’t as simple as free-diving for jade. As Jung pointed out, it’s easier to go to Mars than to penetrate your own being.
Once again I am dove in water the color of the Ring Nebula. My body slinked through the familiar labyrinth of boulders. My mind was lost in shadow as I picked through recent storm debris.
An eye of smooth jade winks at me from beneath a tight overhang. It is nearly hidden in a turbulent bed of storm deposit. Nearly out of breath, I reach into the shadows to claw out the stone by its long, green tail. I scratch at its edges but it will not budge.
This is only the tip of something much, much larger.
Ryan’s story, first penned in January 12, 2015, is dedicated to the memory of Don Webber, who died in 2014. Ryan Master’s beautiful obit to Don may be read here. And yes, the headline quotes are from Mr. Jung himself.
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