Linda May’s Douglas Earthship homesteading project

Linda May’s Douglas Earthship homesteading project grew from a long-deferred plan into a concrete attempt to build a home on five acres of desert in Douglas, Arizona. After years shaped by seasonal jobs and life on the road, she bought the parcel, began working through its practical constraints, and enlisted friends to help. The project’s decisive turn was from imagining a home to securing land and scheduling the first excavation; the account follows that beginning, not a completed house.

From seasonal work to a building site

For a time, Linda’s story seemed likely to continue in the familiar circuit of work and migration. A spring camp-hosting job she thought she had secured with California Land Management was eliminated just as she was preparing to leave the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. After she later became ill with bronchitis near Ehrenberg, neighbors brought food while she was too weak to cook. The care she received showed the ties that made life in nomadic encampments feel like kinship, but it did not settle the question of where she would eventually live.

A couple of months after her illness, Linda told the author she had found land for her Earthship. The discovery redirected the story from another return to seasonal work toward the possibility of a home she could build herself. She had looked at the region before and once judged it too remote and isolated. Now she was measuring the decision against time, health, and the possibility of never living in a house she had made for herself. She expected her nomad friends to travel that road and visit, so settling on land did not mean imagining herself entirely cut off from the community.

A parcel within reach

The opportunity came through a Craigslist advertisement for five acres near the Mexican border, on the western edge of the Chihuahuan Desert. The land lay in a rural district where homesteaders with four or more acres were exempt from county building codes, a circumstance that made the area one of the Pockets of freedom associated with Earthship inventor Michael Reynolds. At 4,200 feet, the parcel also seemed likely to avoid the worst summer heat; if it became uncomfortable, nearby mountains offered possible camp-hosting work.

The listing described unimproved land with legal access but no electricity, well, or septic system. Photographs showed open desert without nearby houses, while the practical drawbacks were equally plain: mesquite had overgrown the bordering roads, and one route crossed a dry gulch vulnerable to flash floods during thunderstorms. Linda first assessed the parcel from a distance. While working as a camp host in Sequoia National Forest, more than a twelve-hour drive away, she used the Cochise County tax assessor’s parcel information to find its coordinates and studied the resulting satellite image. The land was still an image to her then, its arroyos visible like creases across the terrain.

The price made the risk manageable. The seller asked $2,500, payable in installments of $200 down and $200 a month, without interest. Linda had already recognized finances as the obstacle that stalled her Earthship plan, but the low monthly payment offered a way to proceed without first having the full purchase price. After making the down payment, she announced the purchase on Facebook. Ash offered to help with construction, and another nomad, Wendy, said she and her boyfriend would like to visit and work on the build. The project immediately acquired a social dimension: land in Linda’s name, but a prospective undertaking that friends could join.

Making the desert workable

The parcel’s appearance changed when Linda finally visited it. After returning from Kentucky, she camped her first night in the parking lot of an abandoned Safeway in below-freezing predawn weather, then found a low-cost RV park where she could rest and shower. The five acres she had first seen in Craigslist photographs, and later through a smartphone video feed, became a place she could walk across. She said it was beautiful, and the visit made the work ahead more immediate. At sixty-six, she felt she needed to accelerate the project so she could eventually relax and enjoy it.

Her preparations addressed the basic systems the vacant land lacked. She found a local water-delivery service that could fill large tanks, recognizing that collected rainwater might not be sufficient while construction was underway. She planned to have the land surveyed so she would know its elevations before cutting berms for permaculture. She also intended to visit the county building department to ask about setbacks and zoning. The county website, she had read, permitted up to an acre of clearing without a grading permit, which matched the amount of land she wanted to clear.

Linda also secured a small but consequential source of power: a 4,000-watt portable generator bought for $26, more than half off. Its noise, compared with a vacuum cleaner, did not concern her. Its output was far greater than the trickle from the 45-watt solar panel she had been relying on, and she greeted the purchase as a step toward having electricity on the property. These were not yet the renewable systems of the finished Earthship; they were practical means of sustaining herself and advancing construction where there was no grid connection.

Friends, labor, and the first ground broken

Linda planned to begin construction after the next Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. Gary Fallon had agreed to return to the land with her, and LaVonne Ellis was also going. Their first shared task was to build a greenhouse, intended to support organic farming and provide shelter from the elements during work on the house. The greenhouse made the undertaking more than a single building project: it was an early piece of the food-growing infrastructure Linda envisioned, and a place of protection while the rest of the site remained exposed.

The first scheduled operation was less romantic and more exact. Linda found an excavator operator who charged $35 an hour, with no additional charge for gas or travel, and reserved a date in late January. She expected the job to take eight hours. The excavator would clear the overgrown access road, then scrape out a driveway where her Squeeze Inn could park. This sequence mattered: before walls, berms, or a greenhouse, the land needed a usable entrance and somewhere to put the vehicle that served as her mobile home.

A home imagined, a project still ahead

The Earthship represented a shift in what mobility could mean for Linda. Public-land camping could offer nomads free places to stay, but the arrangements were conditional: near Quartzsite, Bureau of Land Management camping generally allowed up to two weeks in one spot before campers had to move at least twenty-five miles or pay to stay in the La Posa Long Term Visitor Area. Elsewhere, enforcement could treat long-term vehicle dwelling as unauthorized residential use, while cities increasingly restricted sleeping in cars. Against that backdrop, acquiring land offered Linda a place to direct her own building effort, though the parcel’s remoteness and lack of utilities made self-sufficiency an enormous practical task.

Her imagined Earthship would provide food, water, power, heating, and cooling through renewable systems and live in harmony with its desert setting. In the account’s closing vision, it is at once shelter and organism, built with Linda’s hands and the help of friends who had become family. But the ending remains prospective: the late-January excavation is reserved, the first route onto the land is to be cleared, and the house itself is still a plan. The project’s achievement at this stage is that its central obstacle—having no land on which to build—has given way to a parcel, a payment schedule, and a first day of work.