One of the more insane adventures of my early 30s was a cross-country road trip with my partner, Linda, her sister Brenda, and our three very large dogs in a '72 Maverick.

The synchronicities and just plain grace I am about to detail took place in the early 1980s, when being in a car that was going thousands of miles was my favorite activity, really my avocation. The three of us had been living in the St. John River Valley in New Brunswick, Canada, and had traveled from there to Monterey, California, to visit my mom, then headed north to Vancouver to visit our friend Edie on the way home.

I knew exactly two people in Vancouver besides my two traveling companions. The first, Edie, had just moved into a new apartment owned by a rather surly immigrant who suspected we had moved in. He took exception to the large dogs, and I think he had visions of a hippie commune building up in his apartment. I can't blame him. We were disheveled and smelled like mutts. We had just spent 4,000 miles in a mobile kennel.

When the apartment below caught fire, it was Brenda who smelled smoke and, unlike the rest of us, she was not too drunk to jump up and scream, "Fire!" Brenda has a scream that can break glass, and it came in handy for waking the upper-floor residents at 3 a.m.

I was still hopping into my pants as I rounded the bend in the hallway. I was shocked by what I saw. The curtains and wall of another apartment had caught fire and the door was wide open. From 30 feet away the heat was horrific. There was a lady inside calling for her cat while she carried a little pan of water to a large chair. She couldn't get near the chair because of the flames; I could barely see or hear her. Fire is really noisy up close, like a wind tunnel in the midday desert.

I yelled to her, "Come to the bathroom window! I have your cat!" That window was the only escape route. When I reached up, my fingers were about a foot from her hand, and she wouldn't jump without a hand. She was frozen there. I frantically started searching for something that I could use to climb up the side of the building, when I saw a man walking down the alley. I practically cried I was so relieved. I ran up and asked him to help me. He backed away, and I saw then that this was one scary-looking fellow.

He kept walking, faster then, but I ran after him, grabbed his arm and said, "No, I mean it! You have to help me or a woman will die!" He looked like he wanted to hit me, but he followed me to the window, reached up and jerked the lady out, right on top of me. By the time we got up, he was gone.

The final piece of luck, or whatever you want to call it, happened later that day, after the fire. Remember I told you I knew exactly two people in Vancouver? The other was a lady named Jackie, a woman I knew in New Brunswick who edited a feminist paper that occasionally carried a story or article of mine. She had moved to Vancouver the previous year and we had lost touch.

Linda had broken her glasses in all the chaos of the fire, so we went downtown to an optical center to have them fixed. While Linda worked with the technician, I stared out the huge front window, watching some prismatic sparkles of sun on the glass. I think I was still in shock. For some reason, my eyes began to focus as a bus pulled up to the curb a half block away. Riveted to that bus, I saw a woman step onto the platform who looked just like Jackie! I ran after her, explained what had transpired and she immediately offered for us to stay with her until we could get the car ready for the return trip and replenish our supplies.

After we left, Edie stayed on with Jackie until her apartment was ready. I can't imagine the spiritual engineering that brought Jackie into my field of vision and got my eyes to focus at the exact moment she stepped off the bus. But it happened just like that.

I don't know the difference anymore between lucky coincidence and grace, but there were a lot of unlikely events that transpired to keep us alive that night. Because we had been out late, we were still awake when the flames started licking up to our windows from below. Brenda was alert enough to smell the smoke and comprehend what it meant. At 3 in the freaking a.m., behind a building engulfed in flames, a guy just happened to be walking by who, though reluctantly, did help. And finally, we ran into Jackie and weren't homeless for even a night.

Between the four of us, we managed to clear the burning building of occupants, heap our earthly belongings on the front yard, and talk the woman who had fallen asleep and started the fire with a lit cigarette out of her bathroom window -- all before the fire trucks arrived.

Over the years, I have often reflected on that crazy three-month trip. Three women, three dogs, a compact car, deep winter, no heater, no money for hotels, bad battery, blizzards and road food. Yet, we arrived at the right place on the single night when a potential tragedy turned into a mere inconvenience. Thanks to serendipity and synchronicity, events unfolded as if choreographed.