Welcome to Home of the Brave, I'm Scott Carrier. Most cities are built on flat ground where trees and buildings block the view of the horizon,

but Salt Lake City sits in a valley between two separate mountain ranges and has something of the shape of a bowl.

Inside this bowl, you can see every other place in the bowl,

distances of 20 miles, but nothing beyond it,

unless you get up on the rim on top of the mountains, and

from there you can see the curve of the earth.

This is what I'm used to, living in a bowl, a high desert basin.

When I leave town and spend time in flat places, surrounded by trees and buildings,

I get claustrophobic, because everything is up close and nothing's far away and if I stay too long I have

panic attacks. I tell this to my friends who live in flat places surrounded by trees

and buildings and they say it is I who live in a claustrophobic

place among the Mormons.

How can you live there, they say?

How can you live surrounded by religious fanatics?

This makes me defend the Mormons, as they are much like people everywhere.

Some are bad, some are good.

It doesn't bother me that Mormons believe God grew up as a human being on a planet called

Kolob. I'm not upset when they tell me he came to Earth in a physical body and had sex with a Virgin Mary.

These beliefs, as Jefferson said, neither picked my pocket nor

break my bones.

And when it comes right down to it, some of the most liberal minds I know come from Mormon families,

men and women who'd be careful before criticizing what they don't understand.

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