HOREB, UTAH
By Tim Slover
Photography: Austen Diamond, VisitUtah.com
There are no houses on this stretch of road. There is instead a wide field of grasses sun-bleached to gold most of the year. Beyond the field are sage-green, rounded humps of foothills. And then the mountains rise suddenly like shouts of granite, the outlines of their peaks cut out against the Klein Blue sky. When I walk there before autumn dawn, dazzling Venus leaps into the sky above them while Mars burns rust-red over the valley and Sirius beckons between, and I feel I’m walking through the whole universe. In a thin copse of lacebark elm is a rock that could have been purpose-built for musing. Sometimes I sit on it, and then the landscape lights up with Spirit.
Tim Slover heads the University of Utah Department of Theatre’s playwriting program and also teaches dramatic literature. He co-directs the Theatre, Fine Arts, and Humanities in London Learning Abroad program, as well as London on Stage and other England-based continuing education programs. His plays include “Joyful Noise,” “Treasure,” “Lightning Rod,” “March Tale, “Utah,” “Hancock County,” “Virtue” and “The Two Noble Kinsmen. His prose includes the novel and radio series “The Christmas Chronicles” and the nonfiction “Messiah: the Little-known Story of Handel’s Beloved Oratorio.”