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.
Photograph by Anacleto Rapping / Los Angeles Times / Getty
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. The expedition leaders were Chris and Jay Speakman. 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. I was in between journalism jobs, and my wife and I were in the thick of raising our year-old daughter. Our friend Stephen Hillenburg had driven down from Los Angeles. His hours not surfing were spent sketching in a little pad he carried with him—shells, sea life, shipwrecks in the distance. And he would beachcomb, collecting bits of rope and buoys, and extricating desiccated sea life from the scum line. 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.
We surfed and fished and camped from Ensenada to Todos Santos, east around Baja’s southern tip into the Sea of Cortez. 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. Some evenings Steve would play the guitar, and Jay would accompany him on harmonica. One night at our campsite, Steve produced a sketchbook of ideas for a cartoon he wanted to create. 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. He explained that his cartoon would take place entirely in a single tidepool, a tiny undersea universe. The sponge would be the lead character.
“A sponge?” one of us remarked, incredulous.
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