The fruit of the Nopal (prickly pear to us Norteamericanos) is an important food in Mexico for both animals and humans. They ripen here in El Charco del Ingenio around this time of year. Large, cultivated-looking fruits, called tunas (see note), are offered in the mercados and by roadside and street vendors. Cheapskates hike out into the campo to pick the smaller wild ones, like those shown below. They're free and they have a much more intense flavor, but you have to peel a lot of them to get a serving. They taste to me a little like watermelon, and they have lots of tiny seeds which you have to swallow.

Photo: Paul Latoures

Birds peck at them, hollowing them out. Beetles and ants follow along, taking advantage of holes made by the birds in the fruit skin to get at all that sugar.

Small mammals and reptiles apparently eat their fill of them, too. I've never seen them eating, but their scat tells the tale.

That red coloring and those seeds came from tunas, still identifiable after passing through some creature's alimentary canal.

Fox and lizard droppings lying on the ground are acceptable to those who walk in the botanical garden, 'cause it's natural, you see. The same is not true for human scat. In response, El Charco's directors provide sanitary facilities.

A few years back, the main restroom was a shack walled with the reed called carrizo, which grows plentifully in riparian zones and is widely used for fencing and privacy screens.

The privacy afforded by carrizo is marginal, but probably adequate for most people's needs. Certainly someone so inclined could peer at bathroom occupants through the screen. But I imagine few peeping Toms visit El Charco.

But at least one visitor would disagree with me. Leafing through the visitors' log, I encountered a statement by an outraged woman who claimed that the caretaker had peered at her through openings in the carrizo while she was using the facilities. Her entry was made in 2002. She called the man a pervert and demanded the directors do something about him. She strongly suggested a new, more secure bathroom was in order.

A couple of pages farther on in the log, an architect drew a sketch of a possible new bathroom for the gardens. (We have such talented visitors in San Miguel.)

A while later, a new bathroom was built, with flush toilets, vanities, and much better privacy.

El Charco, however, is big. It's probably a couple of miles from end to end, especially if you include Parque Landeta, the municipal park on the eastern border that is under the same stewardship as El Charco itself. Parque Landeta solves the sanitation problem with a couple of trench latrines with—you guessed it—carrizo screens.

At the west end of El Charco, a second public bathroom was constructed on the reconstructed ruins of the old mill after which the botanical garden was named.

The building is nice, although our sensitive visitor would probably have been dismayed at the lack of signs for gender assignment. The toilets are the vault type—never pleasant, but welcome when needed.

But these lack stools. They're squatters. Now, probably five billion of Earth's six billion people use squatters. But we Norteamericanos don't. Moreover, Norteamericanos like me have long lost the flexibility to use one. When I try to hunker, I fall over.

Anticipating this, the management presciently provided a length of pipe secured to the wall and floor, to be used for support while squatting. You won't find one of these in an old-fashioned Japanese toilet. You will at least find toilet paper there, but you won't find a grab bar.

(Note: In Spanish, a prickly pear fruit is a tuna; a tuna fish is an atun. Go figure.)