The Chihuahuan Desert is the setting for Linda May’s search for a place to build a home of her own near Douglas, Arizona. In the book, it is more than an expanse of dry land: the mountain-framed border region offers a possible refuge from conventional housing, while its remoteness, exposure, and proximity to the international boundary give that choice practical and political weight.

Geography and Terrain

Linda’s five-acre parcel lies on the western edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, about nine miles north of the Mexican border. It sits at the foot of the Porilla Mountains in the Sulphur Springs Valley, an arid corridor bordering both the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts. The valley stretches nearly a hundred miles through southeastern Arizona and into northern Mexico. Its lower half is framed by mountain ranges: the Dragoons and Mule Mountains to the west, and the Chiricahua Mountains, Swisshelms, Pedregosas, and Porilla Mountains to the east.

The narrator’s drive toward the property conveys the scale and isolation of the landscape without presenting the desert as empty in any absolute sense. Scrubland extends along the route; an asphalt mirage seems to vanish as the car approaches it. Low ranch houses appear intermittently, some long abandoned, with empty door and window openings and rafters showing through damaged roofs. A small shrine crowded with silk flowers and a lone recreational vehicle punctuate the roadside. The scene establishes a region where settled life is scattered and where the landscape itself makes distance conspicuous.

Linda’s Parcel and the Possibility of Building

Linda found the property through a Craigslist advertisement after previously scouting the area and deciding it seemed too remote. Her view changed as she considered the time and strength required to build an Earthship and the possibility that otherwise she might never live in a home she had made herself. The parcel’s rural location brought a specific practical advantage: homesteaders with four or more acres there were exempt from county building codes. Earthship inventor Michael Reynolds called places with this freedom from regulatory constraints pockets of freedom.

The land was at an elevation of 4,200 feet, which was expected to keep summers from becoming too sweltering. Camp-hosting jobs in the surrounding mountains offered another possible way to manage the climate and make a living nearby; the Chiricahua Mountains to the north were part of Coronado National Forest. These possibilities did not mean the parcel was ready for habitation. The advertisement described unimproved land with legal access but no electricity, well, or septic system. Roads bordering it were overgrown with mesquite, and one crossed a dry gulch vulnerable to flash floods during thunderstorms. The same remoteness that allowed experimental building therefore came with infrastructure gaps and exposure to the elements.

The Borderland Around Douglas

The parcel’s proximity to Douglas places it within a border region shaped by movement across the line with Mexico. The book describes drug smuggling at the Douglas port of entry, where agents find marijuana hidden in vehicle panels and spare tires. In one reported case, a sixteen-year-old boy rappelled from the fence into Douglas to collect ninety pounds of marijuana in sacks; he had been promised $400, compared with the $42 a week he earned making vehicle timing belts in a maquiladora. Such details belong to the wider Douglas border setting, not to Linda’s parcel itself, but they make the surrounding region’s economic disparities and border enforcement part of the landscape’s context.

Narrative Significance

The Chihuahuan Desert presents Linda’s homesteading plan as a negotiation between freedom and material constraint. The rural exemption from building codes makes a self-built Earthship more feasible, while the absent utilities, rough access roads, and flash-flood risk make clear that legal room to build is not the same as an equipped or secure home. The desert’s remoteness is first a reason Linda hesitates, then a condition she is willing to accept as the clock on her ability to build becomes more important to her.

The region also connects the book’s account of mobile life to the effort to establish a place of one’s own. Linda expects friends from her nomadic community to travel the road and visit, so settling on the land does not mean imagining herself wholly apart from that community. In this setting, the desert offers neither effortless escape nor simple isolation: it is a demanding place where a home becomes possible through access to land, practical improvisation, and continuing ties to people on the move.