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“You’ll have to tell that story one day,” he replied. I joked that all the press had missed the best part of the “SpongeBob” story-his connection to the ocean as a surfer and how he’d shared his earliest sketches with pals on a surf trip to Baja. He was on his way to South Korea to oversee the animation of the first “SpongeBob” feature film. He’d completed three seasons of the cartoon by then, and he was exhausted. By then he’d made his common kitchen sponge into the hit cartoon and mega brand “SpongeBob SquarePants.” Over the years we would talk on the phone, but mostly I’d followed him in newspaper and magazine articles. I remember calling Steve a decade later, in 2003. How the spark of an idea can become something huge through a combination of hard work, persistence, and creativity, and the ways we were all dreaming and scheming about our own lives at that time. I’ve thought about that trip and that moment often. Photograph by Anacleto Rapping / Los Angeles Times / Getty Hillenburg died, of Lou Gehrig’s disease, on November 26th.
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Stephen Hillenburg at Nickelodeon’s offices, in Burbank, California, in 2002. He explained that his cartoon would take place entirely in a single tidepool, a tiny undersea universe. We passed it around, a collection of dozens of drawings of a square kitchen sponge in shorts and a funny hat, and a variety of other sea-creature caricatures. One night at our campsite, Steve produced a sketchbook of ideas for a cartoon he wanted to create. Some evenings Steve would play the guitar, and Jay would accompany him on harmonica. The winds howled hard offshore for almost the entire month, but the Pacific kept its end of the bargain, sending solid waves almost every day. We surfed and fished and camped from Ensenada to Todos Santos, east around Baja’s southern tip into the Sea of Cortez.
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An unassuming marine biologist with a generous smile who never missed a chance to catch some waves, he’d studied animation at CalArts as a grad student, and was on a break from his job at Nickelodeon. And he would beachcomb, collecting bits of rope and buoys, and extricating desiccated sea life from the scum line. His hours not surfing were spent sketching in a little pad he carried with him-shells, sea life, shipwrecks in the distance. Our friend Stephen Hillenburg had driven down from Los Angeles. I was in between journalism jobs, and my wife and I were in the thick of raising our year-old daughter. They’d explored Baja in the nineteen-seventies before spending a decade as commercial lobster fishermen in the Cranberry Islands, off the coast of Maine. The expedition leaders were Chris and Jay Speakman. It was that kind of trip in February of 1994-a group of seven friends of various ages, including my wife, Idoline, and our baby girl, travelling and camping in four vehicles, a month-long vanishing act into the wild to check in with each other and ourselves. Evenings around the campfire in southern Baja, we’d play music, read from manuscripts, tell stories, and talk about what was next in our lives, or what we hoped would come next.