That was not the case this year. This year's early rains doubled the amount of grass, and the summer drought dried it mercilessly. The trees and cacti had precious little stored moisture with which to fend off the heat of the fire. And the fire burned hot.
Larry Rogers had noted that the rabbits had come back to the seared hills behind his home, and consequently so have the coyotes, but he hadn't yet seen the javelina that used to spar with his dog. Nor had he seen any rattlesnakes. "At least the rains washed away a lot of the blackness," Rogers said.
A troubling aspect of the fire is the lack of concern that some of the Rogerses' neighbors show about the damage. One, who had moved to the neighborhood from Wisconsin two days after the June 10 fire, just shrugged, and although he was disappointed that many saguaros had toppled, said, "Actually, I wasn't too sad because there was a lot of scrub brush out there--half of it was all brown, anyway." In his Midwestern aesthetic, he had dismissed the virgin desert vegetation, not realizing that it would have exploded into yellow blooms with the spring rains.
Real estate agents asserted that the fires would not affect property values in the least. "There are so many scenic vistas in Fountain Hills," one of them sniffed.
"It's going to come back as natural vegetation, whatever happens," another insisted. "It will come back. It will be fine. I'm an old farm girl, and it all comes back after the fire. It's not going to affect property values whatsoever."
Peggy Rogers was not so optimistic. "I find that hard to believe, as positive as I want to be since our house is up for sale," she said. "It's not going to come back."
The hills will be green next spring, but they may not ever be the same as they were. In fact, green shoots are already peeking through the gravel, grasses mostly, some catclaw bushes rising from unburned roots, a thatch of new growth on an ironwood tree. Bursage also comes back quickly after a fire, and so does banana yucca.
Beneath a badly charred paloverde, Patten spots a tiny shoot, a young blue paloverde that has somehow beaten the odds and pushed up hopefully from the ground. If it can compete with the invasive grasses that will plunder the water from the surrounding soil, it may grow into a mature tree.
But it will take 30 years. It may take 100 years for the saguaros to come back, if they come back at all.
A desert arson fire with damages above $1,000 is a Class IV felony. In the unlikely event that the criminal who burned this land is ever caught, he might get a maximum sentence of five years in prison. The desert has already been sentenced to 100 years to life of regeneration.
