San Diego — Where do you find a refuge from the 20th Century? Down a dusty drive in the highland backwoods of Potrero, about 45 miles east of San Diego. It sits huddled beneath clusters of century-old olive and California live oak trees, sheltering a house, two cottages, a trailer, and a metal barn.

This is where Harriett Molloy, 69, a self-confessed "canary from the coal mines of the industrial age," has founded a refuge in the cleanest air she can find in America. "The winds of Potrero blow east and west," she says. "They come off the ocean or the desert. Most of the time they don't blow up from the industries of Mexican Tecate. So far, we can breathe pollution-free."

As soon as you pass beneath the part serious, part humorous wooden sign reading "The Last Resort" and move inside her weatherworn house, you notice subtle differences. Wood is bare, unvarnished. Floors are tile. No wall-to-wall synthetic carpet. No gas heaters or stoves. All electrical energy. Where she allows paint, it's nontoxic, Molloy says; it's been given weeks to breathe out its fumes. Bedding is natural fiber, aired for about a week or more to lose its manufacturing smells, or preferably, already well-used. Even new magazines hang out in the sun, clipped to laundry lines to be "outgassed" - to let the sun leach their chemicals until they're safe to read. Televisions, computers, and refrigerators cluster on the porches of each of the three units - two cottages and a separated part of her house - which Molloy rents out to fellow environmental sufferers. All electronic equipment is kept away from the rooms, so their plastic exteriors and electronic components can have air to dissipate the chemical smells they emit. And, says Molloy, this allows the high-voltage radiation of the TV and computer screens' x-rays to disperse safely.

"Everything we get is secondhand," says Molloy. "Building timber, clothes, computers, TVs, beds - not because they're cheap, but because we need them to have lost their toxicity. We have to find old mattresses, but not ones that secondhand stores have gassed to sanitize them. Having chemical sensitivities affects every aspect of your life."

Molloy and her tenants living on this chaparral-covered property even have to agree on what dish soap, laundry soap, and shampoos they'll use. "No one can be allergic to what anyone else is using," Molloy says. "We're here because we couldn't take the perfumes and pesticides and gasoline smells of city life. So we all understand."

Kitchen dishes are washed with special nondetergent "degreaser" soap. Molloy washes her hands with a coconut soap bar from Mexico. She walks in shoes that are pure leather and have been sitting for weeks in the sun to "outgas."

We talk in a sunroom looking out at a grove of olive trees. I wonder if it's because the olives are dropping pollen that the windows are closed. But Molloy says it's because the winds can get strong up here. Molloy has a moptop head of straight, gray hair. She's been building up this refuge since she arrived in 1979 barely able to walk, poisoned, she says, by the environment of the Midwestern world she came from. "By the time I got here," she says, "I was sensitive to every food but two: carrots and squash. Although I could cope with certain meats, as long as they weren't loaded with hormones."

That meant, believe it or not, "eating lion. Llama. Beaver. Hippo. Because I didn't have an allergic reaction to them. I got them from a specialist wild meat shop in Chicago. I did especially well on llama."

She passes a bowl of organic strawberries sitting on a bed of white sugar - Oregon beet sugar; cane sugar is off-limits. The salt on the table is unrefined sea salt; ordinary salt, she tells me, "can contain sugars and fat." Molloy says her "multiple chemical sensitivities" - still not accepted by mainstream medicine as much more than neurosis - are also called environmental illness and indicate varying degrees of debilitating malaise caused by our industrial age, everything from chemicals to electromagnetic forces.

Molloy swears she is not a neurotic and that her suffering is real. "The other day, I was helping an author compile facts, Xeroxing a heap of papers. I started getting sicker and sicker. I began to ache. Then pulsing pains. I was becoming mentally out of it. I became physically weak. I had to make myself get away from the copying machine and its chemicals before I could recuperate."

In her previous life in Wisconsin, Molloy was a businesswoman who worked in the recording industry, a bank, installed computer systems in a clinic, and designed and built houses with her husband. But after she started becoming chronically tired and sick in the '70s, moving more than once just to find an environment she could live in, her husband ended up leaving her in frustration. That's when she came West alone. "Potrero," she says, "has been known as a healing place for asthmatics since the '30s. "You should have seen me when I arrived. I came in on my last $1000, with oxygen to help me breathe, weak legs, in a wheelchair."

She also came in despite "an endless string of doctors" who told her it was all in her head, that she was mentally ill, not environmentally ill. "I was in pain. Psychological and physical. I wanted to kill myself. The man who saved my life was Dr. Theron Randolph [an Illinois-based clinical ecologist]. He told me I was trace-sensitive. That it was real: I had multiple chemical sensitivities and multiple food sensitivities. His clinic at last gave me a point of reference."

In what seems to her a miraculous series of events, she arrived in Potrero, heard of this property for sale, persuaded her thenPex-husband to sell a piece of land they jointly owned back East, and was able to put a down payment on Potrero just in time. She set up a nonprofit group called Community for the Environmentally Sensitive and began renting out spare rooms and the two cottages on the property to others desperate for a chemically unchallenged life. By word of mouth, her place has become a refuge. Since 1979, "20 to 30" people have come here to live.

"I lived in a car for three months before I found this place," says Nicole, 69, one of the three current "Last Resort" residents, "because I couldn't live in my home anymore. It was killing me. Truly. I lost 35 pounds in that three months before I was able to come here." Nicole, a Belgian who for five years skated with Holiday on Ice, lives in one large room of Molloy's house. It has a tile floor and lots of exercise equipment. "I go to San Diego to have lunch with my husband once a week, and the rest of the time I read. I read a lot. It's very lonely up here. I had to leave my home, my husband, because I could not live with the chemicals in our house in La Mesa. If you knew how desperate I was! This is a godsend. Without Harriett I'd have nowhere to go."

Not everyone shares Nicole's favorable view of Molloy. Ex-tenant Karen Larson, who also suffers from multiple chemical sensitivity, says Molloy's accommodations aren't always up to scratch, and the rents Molloy charges are "outrageous."

"I believed Mrs. Molloy's 'specially designed' housing would be beneficial for my health," Larson says from a trailer site a few miles away. "Because of that I moved from southern Utah to Potrero in 1992. But the room I rented from Mrs. Molloy, for $450 per month, had a leaky roof and was so moldy I became even more ill."

That same room -- currently inhabited by Nicole -- now costs $800 a month. "Mrs. Molloy gets away with this because the people who rent from her are so ill," Larson says. "Some like me have exhausted their resources getting to Potrero and can't leave immediately. Others realize the rent she charges is outrageous, but they cannot find other environmentally safe places to live."

Worse, says Larson, were the day-to-day tensions, as she wondered how long she was going to be allowed to stay. She brings out a series of diaries she kept during her year on Molloy's property. "I'm frightened," reads one 1992 entry about Molloy. "She'll have to be handled with kid gloves." Another entry written shortly before Larson departed in June 1993 reads, "My main reason for moving is the constant threat of the 30-day eviction. The terror of being forced out."

"Karen was one of those people that you rescue," counters Molloy. "She called me from Utah. She had nowhere to go. I accepted her even though her environmental illness was not firmly established." Molloy admits that leaks resulted when a surprise summer storm hit while the roof was being repaired, but she says that Larson "brought a lot of moldy things with her."

As for the rents, Molloy says she keeps the rents as cheap as she can. "Karen doesn't have any idea of the cost-of-living increase, of what it costs to live here, and more than that, she has no concept at all of [what it takes to] coach and counsel and support people with the health problems they're having."

But is the illness real? Dr. Michael Welch, a board-certified San Diego allergist and immunologist, says a diagnosis of multiple chemical sensitivities is not a concept accepted by standard traditional allergists. "We should call it something else," he says. "Like idiopathic environmental intolerances, 'idiopathic' meaning, we don't know what the cause is. We're not saying they don't experience what they're feeling, they just have a lower threshold for something that you and I all experience in life. We deal with it, they don't as well. The question is, why? Is it truly that they're biologically different, or is there something else going on in their life, whether it be anxiety or depression, which then resets the threshold so that they can't handle these things? I don't think we should say that these people are all neurotic. It does warrant further study." But Welch tends to agree with studies that conclude people suffering from multiple chemical sensitivities "have a neurobiologic basis, similar to a panic disorder." That the brain, in other words, triggers the biological response.

But there is no dissuading Harriett Molloy. "I believe in God," she says. "I believe He brought me here. Potrero certainly has saved my life. And in turn I have been able to help others. People like Nicole currently have to wait two years to get into one of the cabins." We finish our coffee and strawberries. Molloy takes me on a tour of the mountainside property. She marches ahead through the sloping grasses, watching for rattlesnakes. Her eyes search downhill. That's where she wants to expand. "Those three acres next door are for sale: $130,000. We need them. There are so many more people we could help if we had the space." Molloy says that before Dr. Randolph died in 1995, he told her that 85 percent of the population is already affected by multiple chemical sensitivities. "People who come here are the canaries in the coal mine. The rest of you just don't know it yet."