COTTONWOOD HEIGHTS — Friends and family confirmed this week that local man Brent Callister, 38, has completely abandoned conventional geography, and now measures every location, event, and several abstract concepts exclusively in minutes from the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon.
“He doesn’t have an address anymore. He has a drive time,” said Callister’s wife, who has watched him direct a pizza delivery driver using only canyon math. “We’re twelve minutes from the mouth. His parents are twenty — ‘the old twenty,’ he calls it, before the traffic. His office is technically negative minutes, which he says means the canyon owes him.”
The system, acquaintances say, is total. Wedding invitations are evaluated by canyon distance. A cousin’s move to Logan was received “like a death in the family” and is described as “basically the moon, canyon-wise.” When asked how far the airport is, Callister reportedly answered “who cares,” a response family members have come to understand as a complete sentence in his geography.
Real estate professionals say Callister is less an outlier than a preview. Listings across the east bench now lead with minutes-from-the-mouth before square footage, and one brokerage confirmed a buyer who rejected a home at 31 minutes with the words “I’m not doing that to my kids,” referring to ski access, not schooling.
Anthropologists note the unit is unstable by design: the same address can be 15 minutes in April and “an emotional journey” on a powder Saturday, when the entire state independently arrives at the same measurement at the same time and the measurement becomes a parking lot with a view.
At press time, Callister was preparing for ski season by refreshing the canyon road report, checking the traction law like scripture, and telling his children — ages six and four — that they live “twelve minutes from the only place that matters,” a fact both children have repeated at school to visible teacher concern.
Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons