Nautilus Earthship

The Nautilus Earthship is the design model at the center of Linda May’s hopes for a home on her land near Douglas, Arizona. She admired its Fibonacci-based floor plan and intended to consult an architect about adapting it to her needs; it was a point of departure for her plans, not simply a finished design to reproduce.

Design and Appeal

For three and a half years, from the time the narrator first met Linda May, she had shown pictures of the Nautilus Earthship, her favorite Earthship. Its floor plan was based on a Fibonacci series. The book offers no further technical description of the structure, but its repeated presence in Linda’s photographs and conversations establishes it as the architectural reference she returned to while imagining a future home.

A Model for a Home

When Linda May visited her land near Douglas, Arizona, the narrator imagined an Earthship rising there, with sloped adobe walls echoing the surrounding mountains. That image belongs to the narrator’s visualization, not to a confirmed specification for Linda’s building. Linda, for her part, was pleased by the land’s mountain views and soil, and wanted to see the site in person before deciding where to build.

Plans for Adaptation

After leaving her seasonal job in Campbellsville, Kentucky, Linda May planned to travel to Taos, New Mexico, to visit the Nautilus Earthship and consult an architect about adapting its design to her needs. She then intended to attend the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous and continue to the desert near Douglas. Once at the property, she expected to camp there when her Amazon job was over and the weather had cooled, taking time to decide where a building should stand. The Nautilus Earthship thus served both as a tangible architectural example and as a guide for a project whose precise site and final form Linda had not yet settled.