A Good Old Country Shit

I’m gonna be honest with you, folks. I’m a fellow who knows how to have a good old-fashioned country shit.

And I’m not squeamish about where I do it. Hell, I’ve been to country towns in the Sierra Madre where there wasn’t even so much as an outhouse to speak of. Where I had to find a cozy, secluded place on the hillside and wipe my ass with rocks. And hope that I was the first person to choose those particular rocks.

But this really takes the cake. Today was the first time I’ve had to face off with venomous animals during my country shit.

All told, the bathroom itself was pretty nice. It was a part of an actual cinder block building, not an outhouse, and even had a light bulb to illuminate it. This is pretty luxurious, considering it was out in the small mountain village of Xoyep, Chiapas, a good 30 minute walk from the nearest road.

But there are a couple interesting things about this particular bathroom. One is that it has a large tank of water adjacent to it, collected from rain runoff, that is halfway outdoors and halfway indoors. This is the water you dip the bucket into to pour into the toilet and flush it. Fairly common in a lot of places. But this particular water tank has hundreds of little tadpoles swimming in it. I guess some momma frog thought it would be a good environment for her kids to grow up in, and laid all her eggs into the tank. So every time you dip your bucket in, you have to be careful not to catch a bunch of tadpoles along with the flushing water. (At least I tried to spare the little guys from being poured into a pile of my shit. This was partly out of compassion, and partly because I was sort of afraid some of them might survive the septic tank and become enormous mutant frogs hell-bent on revenge.)

So today I sit down for my good old country shit, greet the tadpoles in the tank next to me…and next thing I know, I see something move out of the corner of my eye. I turn, and there is The Momma, clinging to the wall next to me, come to check on her babies. This wouldn’t be so bad, except I remembered the family I’m staying with told me that a lot of the species of frogs out here are poisonous. If you frighten them or piss them off, they shoot poison urine out their butts, or something of that nature, and it can blind you if it hits your eyes.

So now I’m trying to hurry up and finish my good old country shit, and thinking the whole time about how not to piss off this momma “hem hem” (the name for frogs in the Tzotzil language, an onomatopoeia derived from the noise they make). And she’s in a protective mood, being around her little baby hem hem’s, so I know I have to move carefully when I dip my bucket in to collect my flushing water.

I’m afraid the story just sort of peters off here in anti-climactic fashion. The momma frog hopped away and I flushed my shit in peace. Still, I’ll bet it’s more exciting than any of the dumps YOU’VE taken this week.