Thinking of moving to Alaska?

Dress warmly and get a job before you go.

So says Tricia Brown, 57, a former resident of Kankakee and Bourbonnais, who has lived in Alaska for most of her adult life. Brown, the author of 16 books on Alaska, was in the area this week, speaking at the Kankakee Public Library and visiting Alan Shepard Elementary School. Now 57, she was a member of the first class that opened the Bourbonnais school.

Her books include both travel topics and children's reading.

The current project she has under way is the Alaska Homesteader's Handbook, a compilation of wisdom from the Last Frontier. It is a collection of 44 stories, ranging from how to put a water hole in a river that will freeze to how to properly set up an outhouse. You put an open box, with no bottom into the river. The ice freezes outside the box as the river flows around it. With your outhouse, make sure to seal up your toilet paper to protect it from vermin.

Brown grew up in Kankakee and Bourbonnais. Her family frequently moved, she said. She left the area after her sophomore year at Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School, finished high school in northern Illinois and moved to Alaska at age 23, heading to Fairbanks in the footsteps of other relatives.

Her parents divorced and several family members lived on Guam, but her brother's sister hated the tropics, so the family relocated so her brother could teach at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.

Tricia, who was known as Patsy Stinson when she lived in this area, followed with her family, driving overland in 1978 -- blowing 12 tires.

Alaska, she said, cost her her first marriage.

"It's a tough place to live," she said. That first year, she said, it stayed 40 below for the month of February.

"Alaska has a phenomenon known as ice fog," she said. "When there's ice fog (frozen crystals in the air) I can't see you (sitting across the table.)."

It took her 20 interviews to get her first job. She worked as a cocktail waitress and a secretary.

Then she earned a journalism degree from he University of Alaska-Fairbanks. She landed a job as the features editor for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, putting out a weekend magazine. Later she wrote for the Anchorage Daily News and became the editor of the prestigious Alaska magazine. She now lives in Oregon, but learned to love Alaska.

"The heat is killing me," she said of her visit to Illinois.

Alaska and Alaskans are different.

There are few taxes in Alaska, which has a "permanent fund" built up by invested oil revenues. Very few communities, she said, even have a sales tax. The downside is that you can't be homeless in the winter.

Her opinion on Alaska's most famous resident?

"Sarah Palin was a very popular governor," she said. She did a lot of good work for the state." She remembers Palin when the future national candidate was serving on the city council of Wasilla.

"I'm not sure she's presidential material," Brown said. One of Brown's books, the "Alaskan Night Before Christmas," bears a dust jacket endorsement by Palin.

"Sometimes people want to buy the book and ask me if I can remove the Palin notice. I can't." she said.

Alaskan politics, she said, are different. Her sister Lynette is a gold miner, who has been featured before in the pages of The Daily Journal. Lynette is also active in the Alaska Independence Party, which hopes to have the state secede from the union.

"It's not like there is going to be an insurrection," she said. But folks on the lower 48 do not understand Alaska, which, at times, is treated like a colony, with the federal government making huge decisions about Alaska's natural resources.