In the middle of nowhere, a Promised Land - High Country News
But about seven miles east in the sagebrush desert, there’s a group of people who came here because they saw it as their “last, best place” — a refuge for those who cannot handle the constant onslaught of non-organic chemicals and electromagnetic... Night had fallen by the time I arrived at the modest house of Susie Molloy, who serves as a kind of welcoming committee for the neighborhood and had volunteered to show me around. I turned off the car, and the desert stillness settled over me, no sounds but the creaking of the car door and the wind whipping through a chain-link fence, billowing my T-shirt. Molloy — a tiny, crop-haired 66-year-old who gives off a sense of bristling intelligence — greeted me at the door. She had already asked me to forgo shampoo and lotion for a couple of days before I arrived, and wear smoke-free clothes. That’s because she, along with a few dozen nearby residents, has severe chemical sensitivities, or what they call “environmental illness” or EI. We settled in a couple of chairs in her kitchen-bedroom area, and she offered me a bowl of chicken soup. “Sometimes people get here and say ‘I can actually breathe and walk around here, but I’m so lonely I could die. She says that even the vestiges of those chemicals on me could affect her. Source: www.hcn.org
