My dad and I have been rehabbing my old porch this fall. We’ve done most of the work ourselves but for certain things we’ve hired help, and so I’ve been spending some afternoons with an electrician and a painter. They are kind, hard-working guys. I’m always happy to see them in their trucks, backing into the driveway.

The electrician went to school with one of my younger brothers and lived for a short time at my mom’s house when he was a teenager. Now he’s a dad and a former marine, something that makes me proud of him. He’s thoughtful, mature and competent.

He was also leaning towards Trump last time we talked.

Our sons started kindergarten on the same day this fall. We exchanged pictures of them in first-day clothes. We were both emotional. Me, because of passing time. Him, because he worried for his kid’s safety. It might not be rational, he told me as I watched him twist wires, but that’s how he feels. As the conversation went on, he lifted his pant leg to show me a small handgun strapped to his ankle.

He told me Trump. I told him Clinton. 'Are you crazy?' I asked. 'Are you crazy?' he replied

Many people own firearms here in Alaska, and many people carry them all the time, often concealed. It’s part of the culture, and practical in rural places. Even so, I thought about my electrician friend later, about feeling like it might come down to that, that you might need to protect yourself and your family because nobody else would.

The next time he came by, we talked about the election. He’s self-employed. Alaska’s health insurance situation under Obamacare might be the worst in the country. That alone was a reason to want a change. Plus, he’d read somewhere about Clinton being in poor health. I told him I was voting for her. I wasn’t passionate about it, but I’m a journalist, gay, married, with children, I said. I didn’t want to end up in the clink.

We both laughed. He flipped on the lights and they worked. It was about time for him to head out, he said.

Next came the painter. He nearly died of cancer some time ago and my dad, a doctor, cared for him. He works a little slower now, but he’s full of wisecracks and calls me “darlin’”. He’s got nothing but gratitude about being alive. The day before the election, I asked who he was voting for. He told me Trump. I told him Clinton.

“Are you crazy?” I asked. “Are you crazy?” he replied.

She’s really smart, I said. He’d heard she’d had people killed, he said. I told him to read a regular newspaper. He said the media was part of the problem. They get things wrong all the time.

I thought about that as the election results unfolded. There it was, the thing that seemed like it would never happen. With the children asleep, I scrolled through hundreds of apocalyptic tweets. What would be our place in the world? The supreme court? Syrian refugees? Muslims? Journalists? The environment? Have you heard Mike Pence talk about gay people? Were our children safe here? My grandmother was in Italy during the rise of fascism. I felt alarm coming from my DNA.

I got it then, all the paranoid stuff I’d heard when I switched my car radio to the local conservative talk station the past eight years. The preppers. The gold bars. The guns. Feeling afraid. Like your rights might be taken away. Like nobody saw your concerns. I wanted to move somewhere off the grid.

I grew up in Alaska, just as my wife had. It felt right to us, and real, all the differences here between people

Then I heard my son crying in the other room. I went in to find him in his bed, struggling to breathe with the croup. We tried giving him a steamy shower, but it did nothing. We were gearing up for the ER when I thought of one last trick. I bundled him up and took him outside. I held him on the porch in the cold air. His breathing settled down. He fell asleep.

We lived in Portland once for a couple of years. I remember during the second George W Bush election, watching the results come in with complete surprise. I hadn’t even seen a single yard sign for Bush. That was part of why we couldn’t stay there. It was a bubble, a monoculture. I’d grown up in Alaska, just as my wife and my parents had. It felt right to us, and real, all the differences here between people and the way we live with them. Now I’ve been in Anchorage so long, every face looks familiar.

Sometimes, when I start to worry I am too far from the rest of the world to be a writer, I comfort myself with the idea that what I get in exchange for this isolation are all these nuanced relationships with interesting people, some that go back to my parents’ childhoods and wind out through my extended family and my wife’s family. I know the history of all the city blocks on my way to work.

Community like this is what I want for my kids. It’s valuable and rare. It takes work and time and it goes deeper than politics. I can’t let politics destroy it. Aside from my family, this community is all I’ve got.

Somewhere about then, Donald Trump was giving an acceptance speech. My mom, a few houses down, was wiping tears off her face. I was holding my son in the cold, looking at the lights of my city and a smudge of moonlight beneath the clouds and the outline of the mountains I’d grown up with, same as ever.