You can learn a lot looking out your kitchen window.

There’s the usual stuff we’ve all seen regularly. The flora and fauna are interesting, but honestly, they can get boring.

On Monday, though, there was something new.

As I looked to the south in the early hours, a gray haze hung in the morning sky. The lilt of an all-too-familiar scent wafted by.

I knew it immediately. Brush fire, wildfire … call it what you want. Something was burning somewhere.

Though the haze was not as heavy and the odor not as pungent as what we experienced from Canadian wildfires in the summer of 2023, it certainly was something big.

As the last of the coffee dripped from the Keurig, I checked social media, the modern day equivalent of emergency scanners or fire sirens that were common in my younger days.

On this morning, though, there was nothing local. Homes, businesses and local manufacturing sites were unscathed.

The haze and odor that filled the air was instead coming from more than 20 miles to the south as the crow flies as flames spread along Blue Mountain in Lehigh Township, Northampton County.

A wildfire began there Saturday and spread over some 180 acres over the mountainside near Palmerton, the imaginary boundary between home and the Lehigh Valley that’s been in my mind since boyhood.

Mother Nature hit the trifecta.

The lack of rain and warm temperatures in the last few weeks, helped by an abundance of dry, crisp fuel joined with a breeze that sparked the fire and fanned the flames along portions of the Appalachian Trail.

As phone lines lit up at local emergency centers, firefighters mobilized on the ground and in the air in an attempt to slow the fire’s crawl — a tough job in any conditions, let alone on the side of a mountain.

Night-time images popped up on social media screens, a spectacular sight painting an orange line across the darkness almost befitting the Halloween holiday just days before.

And on Sunday, smoke eaters searched for another solution.

A “back burn” was the answer.

It’s nothing new, though the methods may have been upgraded over the years, the general idea is to start another fire along a road or “fire break” that would burn in a direction opposite from the main blaze. Somewhere in the middle, the fires meet and extinguish themselves when both run out of fuel.

The idea conjured some boyhood memories when I saw a brush fire in the patch town where I was raised.

An “old-timer” — by the standards of the 10-year-old I was back then — who was trained as a fire boss in the local deep-mining days knew the dangers of what a brush fire might do to a vein of coal near the surface.

I watched then as he pulled out of his pocket the old, flip-top Zippo he used to light his pipe. Instead, he ignited newspapers to start the second blaze. In a few hours, it was problem solved.

That’s not the case here, but the idea is the same.

As I write this, the Blue Mountain is still ablaze. As you read this, it may still be burning. Here’s hoping the back burn worked and left just a few, lesser spots for crews to clean up.

Perhaps the larger picture here, though, is what I learned about the sense and strength of a community that came together to support more than 200 who turned out from local, state and national sources.

Almost as fast as the flames flared, residents and businesses mobilized to feed and supply the first responders battling the blaze.

Downtown business people from Lehighton showed up with supplies — first one truckload, and possibly two more.

Restaurants were ready with hot meals, a welcome change from the smoke firefighters tasted during a shift on the fire line.

Relief organizers also recommended people donate money to defray the cost of hot meals, while still welcoming personal care items and batteries — things that have a longer shelf life that can be used during any emergency.

The lesson here is simple. When a community comes together, it can put out fires of any kind.

Hopefully that spirit takes hold. Who knows what can happen?

I’ll keep looking out the kitchen window.

ED SOCHA | tneditor@tnonline.com

Ed Socha is a retired newspaper editor with more than 40 years’ experience in community journalism. Reach him at tneditor@tnonline.com.

The foregoing opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Times News LLC.