The morning after the election, I drove my sons to school like any other weekday. My ten year old son Sam slumped in the corner of the backseat. He had sulked his way through the morning and into the car. I was confronted with a parental challenge, one of those moments when your child’s fears take precedence over your own.

The election had been in the forefront of our family discussions for more than a year. The previous Monday, Sam and I had traveled to Erie, PA to promote democratic candidates and the vote by canvassing door-to-door. I wanted to allay his fears by simply talking to him about losing a hard-fought election. But, there was more to it than that. I wanted to allay his fears by saying that our country is pulled together by the tension between two opposing parties. But, there was more to it than that. I believe we elected someone who is a threat to our democracy. And now he will hold the highest office in our land. I was afraid. I am afraid. My fear had become my son’s.

I needed to figure out how to put my fears and anxieties aside for his sake and locate words of encouragement. I wasn’t feeling it. At the moment, the only words surfacing were W.H. Auden’s:

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

And, I had a headache which I earned during the night when I awoke every hour to check my phone for election results. I seemed to be flailing between existential angst and ordinary gripes.

I tried to summon the right words to reassure my boys. I said nice words that sounded like kindness, love, and strength, but they weren’t attached to a lucid sentence. I sounded as ineffectual as one of the adults from a Peanuts’ cartoon, “Mwa Mwa Mwa.” I could not get these kids to their respective schools fast enough. I needed time and rest to process this.

As we drove across the Tifft Street overpass, four-year-old Cal who delights in the trainyard beneath, yelled out, “Mama look. That smoke.” There on the horizon was a huge plume of black smoke reaching up to the cloud bank. The plume funneled down to where the smokestacks of Bethlehem Steel Plant once burned. I turned on the radio for news.

Election coverage.

I began to panic. Those buildings once housed a forge of hellish temperature. What could have set such a place ablaze? What other chemicals or toxicity lurked in those buildings?

I could not manage my fears. The local newscaster came on the radio and confirmed that the fire was located at the former Bethlehem Steel Plant. There was no further news other than they were awaiting more fire crews to arrive. In my frenzied state, the fire seemed to lick at the car’s back tires. The election and that fire began to meld together.

The president-elect’s voter base was white men who did not attend college. In South Buffalo, I live among these men. Most of the families-including mine-had originally moved here because of its proximity to the steel plant. The resentment over the loss of manufacturing jobs continues, generation after generation, no matter the fluctuations in the unemployment rate or the creation of new jobs.

Had the white working class set their industrial past ablaze? This was a ridiculous thought. If anything, these men would feel validated by the election. But I have become afraid of them-men I count as my family. I am afraid of their resentments, how they burn regardless of who it hurts. I wanted to drive and drive and drive away from this vision of working class men coming for our nation like zombies in some crazed apocalypse. But that smoke, which was now behind us, mocked my effort.

Cal asked, “Will the fire come to my school?”

PULL IT TOGETHER.

That plume of smoke captivated my children’s imagination and there it would play ominously all day long. I learned that our minds worked this way when I read about the making of the movie Jaws. During the filming, Steven Spielberg couldn’t get the mechanical shark to work properly. The daily rushes of the film looked terrible and the movie was fast becoming a wash. It could have been the expensive flop that ended his career. But, the knowledge he may have lacked about the workings of mechanical sharks he made up with by going to film school.

“I had no choice but to figure out how to tell the story without the shark,” Spielberg said. “So I just went back to Alfred Hitchcock: ‘What would Hitchcock do in a situation like this?’ ... It’s what we don’t see which is truly frightening.”

He showed a dorsal fin, an open mouth, a fleeting glimpse but never the whole shark.

Instead of allaying my children’s fears, I had created for them, as well as myself, a menace more terrifying, a glimpse of actual looming danger. Our imagination latches on to what it sees and our fears do the rest. Before long, in their minds, the fire would consume the skyline. My imagination had already filled that horizon with the zombie apocalypse.

I turned the car around.

“What are you doing?” Sam asked.

“I’m going to take a picture.”

I pulled the car down a side street and got out. I saw the smoke’s shape, color, and size. I did my best to put my fears aside and simply witness it. I needed to stop making it worse but I couldn’t minimize it either. I had to keep my eye on it. Check it. Measure it. Keep track of it. Like all things in this world, it would have a beginning, a middle and an end. I took a picture of it.

I could not allay my children’s fears before I allayed my own. By looking directly at what I feared, I assessed its dimensions and put my fear in check. I got back in the car and said, “I couldn’t get that good of a picture. The fire is really far away and not as big as we thought. Look at it.”

We did not flee. We sat in the car and watched the fire together. Sam thought the smoke was blue; Cal insisted it was black. We talked about my grandfather and how he went to work there for 40 years. After a while, I pulled the car back onto Tifft and we merged onto Route 5. I pointed to the other side of the road, “Look, the fire trucks are on the way. They’ll take care of that fire.”

Whatever was burning was toxic and flammable enough to burn for another day.

Cal continued to ask about it. The next day, the air smelled of burned plastic. I told him that was from the fire. We stayed inside. He wanted to see “what the fire did to the plant.”

“Yes, I want to see it too,” I told him.

I took him to see the remains a few days ago. At the site, trucks and cranes worked to clean up the damage wrought by the fire. This is good, I thought. People had already taken stock of the damage and decided on a course of action. They mobilized. To see people working at the Steel Plant again encouraged me, just as I am heartened to see those in our nation rally to activism again. Whatever else happens, we move forward.

Yes, finally, something I can tell Sam.