Author's voyage is one of a few steps
and many years

Sally Ford knew it was a trip she must take.

Physically, the distance was not great. Just a few strides, in fact, across her very own living room put her face-to-face with her ultimate destination. Ford was trying to reach her own bookshelf for a sort of family reunion.

With her recently published children's book "Bungee's Voyage", the 63-year-old Ford has fulfilled her homecoming. She's joined the ranks of published authors that include her grandfather Ralph D. Paine, her father Philbrook Paine, and Dan Ford, her husband of 35 years.

"Of course I wanted to add my title to the shelf. There's something very permanent about one's words when they're between the covers," Ford says.

Much like her title character, a scruffy gray dog, Ford has found satisfaction in completing an exhilarating but at times difficult task. She has created a children's book, sparkling with the watercolor images of Portsmouth's Peter Dudley, which speaks intelligently about the thrill of sailing. Bungee learns to be both self-sufficient as she departs the familiar waters of her home and encounters the harrowing brutality of a stormy sea. Coping with both fear and despair born of solitude, Bungee discovers the wonderful comfort of people, poetry and art.

In many ways, "Bungee's Voyage" is a family tribute to Ford's paternal clan, which has been encamped near Oyster River and Great Bay for nearly a century. In its general themes of personal discovery through the challenges of sailing it harkens back to many of the 42 books written by Ralph D. Paine, who moved his family to Durham in 1906 and died in 1924. A few of Paine's titles are still in print, including The Old Merchant Marine and A Cadet of the Black Star Line (both reissued in 2001). The Book of Buried Treasure and Ships and Sailors of Old Salem are considered collector's items.

"I think, in his time, he was quite well known as an author," Ford says of her grandfather. At the least, he had one particularly famous fan.

"We have letters from Teddy Roosevelt to my grandfather saying things like, `bully good book,'" Ford says with a proud laugh. Her grandfather had met Roosevelt during the Spanish-American War when Roosevelt was first coming to national prominence with his Rough Riders outfit and Ralph Paine was serving as a war correspondent.

The genesis of Bungee, though, can be found in the parallel adventure of the Ford's only child, Kate. Now 34, the mother of two young girls, an expedition sailor and freelance writer, Kate Ford Laird embarked on a similar journey shortly after graduating from Harvard in 1990. She flew from Boston to Ecuador to sail with and tutor three children of a family that the Fords had never met across a huge berth of the Pacific to Tahiti.

While appreciating her daughter's wanderlust, Sally Ford, like any mother, had piques of anxiety.

"I found a nautical chart of the Pacific and it showed that the water was a mile deep," Sally recalls. "I rolled the chart up and never looked at it again."

What she set her mind to, instead of worrying, was writing a children's book about sailing. It's a project she seems destined to have tackled.

"Was it Hemingway who said, `Write what you know?' I certainly know something about boats," says Ford. Indeed, she began sailing herself at age 13 when her father bought her one of the very first of the 13.5-foot MerryMac boats built by Ned McIntosh of Dover. According to Ford, there are now over 200 MerryMacs tooling around area waters. "We used to race them as a class, right around the General Sullivan bridge." One summer as a young woman she taught sailing out of the Portsmouth Yacht Club.

Ford merged one life-long interest with another when she joined sailing with children's books, a genre she's adored as a girl, a mother and now a grandmother.

Writing "Bungee's Voyage" came "very easily with my sailing experience and what Kate had written us about the Pacific." Perhaps a little too easily. When Ford had finished her first draft it was 60 typewritten pages.

What took longer was the process of whittling away from the draft. It was a process that took nearly a decade, with the manuscript spending long stretches tucked away in a bureau drawer.

"I probably chopped three-quarters of it. There were just too many stops, too many disasters," Ford says.

Finally there came a time when "Bungee's Voyage" emerged from the drawer and Ford was satisfied.

"Then I put it away and got it out again later and then I thought, OK, this is good," Ford says.

The next step was finding the right illustrator. As it turned out, the right person was someone the Fords already knew.

An illustrator, painter and wood sculptor, Dudley had never illustrated a children's book. What he did bring to the project was a sailor's knowledge of boats and the sea and a background in architectural concept drawing that enhanced each illustration's accuracy and detail.

"What I tried to give them was a sense of what it was like at sea," says Dudley, who worked on the project for a year.

Ford asked for one picture, at least, for each page. The end result is 44 full-color watercolors in the 38-page book, which was published this spring by Peter E. Randall Publisher of Portsmouth.

"It's an unusual amount of illustrations for a book and I think that adds to (the book's) appeal," Dudley says.

Ford says, "I think Peter's drawings did make the book."

Dudley is equally generous of his praise, for the book as a whole and also for Ford's ability to communicate what she was looking for.

"She was very direct about what she wanted," Dudley says. "When a drawing arrived she would point out very clearly what she wanted to correct and I like that."

The title character was "always a dog," Ford says. At some point in the process, Bungee became a girl. But for all the years of association with this character, in the end it was left up to Dudley to determine exactly what Bungee would look like.

With instructions from Ford that it had to be a "scruffy little mongrel dog," Dudley nearly was stalled before he started. That's when Dudley's wife, Margaret Skalski, herself an artist and sculptor, chanced upon a small stuffed dog, with tightly-coiled hair, at Treehouse Toys in Portsmouth. Skalski then added to the dog by sewing clothes and even making pint-sized life vest.

"I'm very pleased. I think they did a beautiful job with the book," Dudley says. "I think the text is interesting and I think it spans, in terms of appeal, a wide range of ages."

Bungee does serve as a basic primer on nautical terms, complete with a glossary. Ford tries to capture more than just the language of sailing as Bungee and her boat Gypsy Rover go down the coast of North America, through the Panama Canal and across the mammoth Pacific. She's also trying to navigate the reader through the emotional waves of sailing, both the glory of a tropical sunset and the fear and doubts that creep into sailor's minds when there is nothing but the vastness of the sea on the horizon.

"I hope people who sail will feel that it is a real sailing adventure. And I think people who sail will feel that," Ford says. "And I hope people who don't sail will still fee that it is a venture worth reading."

While Bungee sets out to circumnavigate the globe, Ford purposely left the book with an open-ended conclusion. Her title character faced her own fears and doubts (at one point Bungee swears, "When I get to Tahiti, I'm going to quit. Everyone will think I'm a wimp. A chicken. I don't care.") and has opted to continue the voyage. She may still be on the other side of the earth from her home among the fir trees of a New England coastline but her spirit is once again strong.

For Bungee, there is still more to explore.

"Isn't that the way life is?" Ford asks. "The voyages still go on and the adventures still go on."