Linda’s planned Earthship

Linda’s planned Earthship is Linda May’s effort to turn a long-held dream into a home she can build herself on raw desert land near Douglas, Arizona. More than a design, it is a proposed source of lasting shelter: a place shaped around renewable systems and the desert, and a foundation for a future that need not depend entirely on seasonal work or temporary places to park. By the end of the account, Linda has secured the land and arranged the first excavation, but the Earthship itself remains a project under way rather than a completed house.

From stalled idea to land of her own

Linda had been carrying the Earthship idea for years. After a first Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, she scouted the region near Douglas but judged it too remote and isolated. Later, while camp hosting in the San Bernardino Mountains, she read Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality. She had originally given the book to her son-in-law; when he showed little interest, she began reading it herself. She described her Earthship as a stalled project and identified finances as its obstacle, while questioning whether money had to be an insurmountable barrier.

The change came when Linda found a Craigslist listing for five acres near the Mexican border, on the western edge of the Chihuahuan Desert. The property was about nine miles north of the border town of Douglas. The seller’s price was $2,500, payable in manageable installments: $200 down, then $200 a month, with no interest. That arrangement made ownership seem attainable without first accumulating the full purchase price. Linda had once rejected the area as too remote; now she was conscious that time and physical strength were finite, and that postponing the project could mean never living in a home she had built herself.

The parcel offered both practical advantages and stark limitations. At 4,200 feet, it was expected to have less punishing summer heat than lower desert country, and its rural location exempted homesteaders with four or more acres from county building codes. Michael Reynolds, the inventor of the Earthship, called such lightly regulated places “pockets of freedom,” where experimental building could proceed with less red tape. But the listing described unimproved land with no electricity, well, or septic system. Overgrown mesquite bordered the roads, and one road crossed a dry gulch vulnerable to flash floods during thunderstorms. The purchase was not a ready-made homestead; it was a commitment to solve the problems of access, water, site preparation, and construction in sequence.

A design imagined in the landscape

For three and a half years, Linda had shown the narrator pictures of the Nautilus, her favorite Earthship model, whose floor plan follows a Fibonacci series. Its sloping adobe walls suggested a building that might echo the contours of the surrounding mountains. The evidence does not establish that the Nautilus was definitively selected as the final design for her property; it records it as the image through which she had repeatedly imagined what an Earthship could be. When she finally saw the land, the imagined architecture began to acquire a specific setting.

Linda was pleased by the panoramic mountain views, the quality of the soil, and the fact that the parcel had been properly surveyed and marked. She had feared finding terrain as rocky as the gravel terraces around Ehrenberg, where she had camped after the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. Instead, the surveyed boundaries and workable dirt reassured her that the acreage could support the plan. She expected to camp on the property after her Amazon job ended and the weather cooled, then spend time there deciding exactly where the house should stand. The intended building site was not yet fixed; she imagined that living on the land would let the right location reveal itself.

The Earthship’s purpose was practical as well as architectural. Linda envisioned renewable systems for food, water, power, heating, and cooling, so the building would function as a home adapted to its desert environment. She pictured it as an organism living in harmony with the landscape, and as a structure that could outlast its builders. That durability distinguished the project from the temporary shelters and seasonal arrangements that had shaped much of her life on the road.

Preparing to build

Before construction, Linda began addressing the land’s basic requirements. She found an inexpensive water-delivery service capable of filling large tanks. Although Earthships collect rainwater in cisterns, she recognized that rainfall might not be sufficient, especially while construction was in progress. She also arranged to have the land surveyed so she could understand its elevations before cutting berms for permaculture. A planned visit to the county building department would clarify setbacks and other zoning details. Linda had read that she could clear up to an acre without a grading permit, which matched the scale of the initial work she wanted to do.

The first step was to be breaking ground after the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. Gary Fallon agreed to return to the property with her, and LaVonne Ellis planned to go as well. Together they intended to build a greenhouse, making it possible to farm organically and giving plants some protection from the elements while the house was being constructed. The greenhouse was therefore both an early building project in its own right and support infrastructure for the longer undertaking.

Linda also arranged for an excavator operator to work at $35 an hour, with no additional charge for gas or travel. The estimated job was eight hours, and a late-January date had been reserved. The sequence was deliberately basic: clear the overgrown access road, scrape out a driveway where the Squeeze Inn could park, and then prepare the main building site. In the book’s projected scene of the work, the excavator’s bucket cuts through scrub, cactus, and stone. When the machine leaves, the cleared space is described as one acre ready for building. This marks the threshold of construction in the narrative, not evidence that the finished Earthship already exists.

Shelter, mobility, and the meaning of ownership

The project takes shape against a broader backdrop in which people living in vehicles could find shelter without finding a secure right to stay. Walmart parking lots offered some travelers overnight refuge, but the practice varied by location; some stores barred it, and others withdrew permission after visitors created encampments. In March 2015, a confrontation between police and an eight-member family living in a Chevy Suburban at the Walmart Supercenter in Cottonwood, Arizona, ended in a traveler’s death. The store began rousting overnight visitors afterward. A parking place could offer temporary shelter while remaining subject to rules, complaints, and sudden eviction.

Public land offered another, also conditional, alternative. Near Quartzsite, free Bureau of Land Management camping was generally limited to two weeks in one place, after which campers had to move at least twenty-five miles or pay to stay in the La Posa Long Term Visitor Area. Separately, rangers in Coconino National Forest questioned van and RV campers about their home addresses; people judged to be making residential use of the forest could be ticketed and evicted. Across cities, laws restricting sleeping in cars and other forms of public presence were also increasing. These conditions do not explain every choice Linda made, but they clarify the difference between mobility by choice and dependence on places where staying could be prohibited.

Against that landscape, the Earthship represents an attempt to make a durable home on land Linda owns, rather than relying solely on the shifting permissions attached to a parking lot or campground. Its promise is not that the difficulties disappear: the property lacks utilities, the roads need work, and construction requires money, labor, water, and planning. The significance lies in the concrete beginning Linda gives the dream—installments on the land, a greenhouse plan shared with friends, and an excavator reserved to clear the first acre. The house is still ahead of her, but the project has moved from pictures in a binder to a place whose boundaries, soil, and first building steps she can identify.