If ever there were a man cut out to mount a mullet tour of Mississauga, it is George Carlson.
The man has the pedigree for one thing: he wore a modified version of the haircut known as “business in the front, party in the back” when he was doing his Don Johnson impression in his younger days.
He ran a body shop in Streetsville in the ’80s where the majority of the clients sported the look — that is, of a hair style put together by a committee of schizophrenic clip-do-maniacs.
One of his clients had the hairdo, but couldn’t get the name right. He kept calling it a “Mullock.”
It turns out the Carlson family even has property claims to the name mullet. The Mississauga councillor’s great-great-grandfather originally owned much of the land in Streetsville that straddles the Mullet Creek.
So it was inevitable, in retrospect, that the young Scotsman who is trying to visit all of the places in the world with the word “mullet” in them and Carlson would get together.
And that, they did, in Streetsville this morning when Simon Varwell spent the second day of his first-ever visit to Canada getting the low down from Carlson on the mullet highlights of Mississauga.
Over breakfast at Ari’s Restaurant, the Ward 11 councillor recalled how, as a kid, he and his friends used to camp out in the area and fish and swim. “In the spring, the creek would fill up and become like a lake and we would go iceberg jumping — that’s what we called it. We would jump on and ride down the creek on these icebergs.”
His great grandfather insisted that, at one time, you could once walk across the creek on the backs of the breed of fish from which the creek takes its name.
“It was six ft. across in those days,” laughed Carlson. “It was the mighty mullet then” and ran red with the clay from some of the 14 brickyards in the village.
After breakfast, we drive west along Tannery St. where Simon gets his first look at the Canadian Mullet Creek, not to be confused with two he has already visited in Australia.
We stop at Mullet Dr. and stroll along the Mullet Walk, which stretches from McFarren Blvd. to Hillside Dr. We look for a nice big sign so that Simon can pose for the entry that will inevitably appear on his web site, www.simonvarwell.co.uk, as he counts down his visits to the 27 known mullet sites in the world.
No sign.
We drive up to Mullet Creek Park, which stretches from the 401 south to Argentia Rd., where Simon poses for the photo above. We try both ends of the park.
No sign.
As we say goodbye to Carlson — who dubs his Mullet Tour — “the most unusual request I’ve ever received in my political career” he vows to get the roads department to do something about the missing Mullet signeage.
Varwell has come half-way across the world to bag the most Mullet sightings he’s ever collected in a single day and, except for one tiny street sign on Mullet Dr., he has no photographic proof of his success.
We head down to UTM to find the spot where the Mullet meets the Credit. The fact that we get to take a lovely walk through Principal’s woods and enjoy the sight of historic Lislehurst on company time is just coincidental. We find the confluence, but it must be viewed from the banks of the Credit far above. Simon can barely get a shot of the water through the trees.
But all in all, it’s been a good day for a mullet hunter. A creek, a street, a park and a personal history from a man who once wore a “semi-mullet.”
How would Simon sum up Mulletdom in Mississauga?
“No signs,” he answers.
“Other than that, it’s been lovely. It’s great to see things in the context of how this city has grown, the history and the environment. This one has been much more educational than the other ones have been.”
Oh, and if anybody knows of any other Mullets that he can visit, what would Simon recommend?
“Don’t contact me,” he says. “I don’t want to know.”
It seems even mullet mania has its logical limits.