Backfire is right and wrong

Praise also came from other professionals.

"Awesome," a U.S. Forest Service crew leader said, shaking his head in disbelief. "You did an awful lot of work up here."

Walking his property Saturday, Micah Curtis, still in a silver hard hat and a yellow fire suit smudged by soot and dirt, pointed just down the ridge to a neighbor's home, now only a smoldering pile of debris.

As flames encroached, he said, he feared that the fire would circle below his family's homestead and "come racing up at us through a thousand feet of dry brush."

As for the backfires, he said, "I was the one who OKd the idea. So the buck stops with me."

His younger brother, however, took the fall.

They were at work on the backfires when fire officials spied them from the other side of the Big Sur River gorge, Micah Curtis said. When officers arrived on the scene, Ross Curtis turned himself in as the culprit so the others could keep working.

Micah Curtis still believes that he and his brother should be receiving thanks, not condemnation, from the authorities.

After all, he said, firefighters didn't volunteer to do the job for them.

"They have some computer program that says our place is undefendable," he said. "But their idea of defendable space is something as flat as Nebraska. This is no more dangerous than some sketchy part of L.A., and that doesn't keep the police from going into a rough neighborhood."

Ross Curtis, however, sounds more contrite. Maybe it's the experience of having been behind bars, even if he was bailed out after only a few hours.

He is scheduled to be arraigned July 15 on two misdemeanor counts. In the meantime, he can't get through the police blockade set up after evacuation orders. So he's staying in a trailer near Monterey Bay, lent to him by his wife's father, a Baptist preacher.

Without their two weeks of toil, Ross Curtis believes, the family's ridge-top homes would have been destroyed. He said he doesn't think he's guilty of anything more than protecting land he cherishes. Still, he understands why fire officials are irate.

They explained it to him, he said, during his brief stay in jail. An unauthorized backfire, they said, can catch a team of firefighters unaware and perhaps put those crews in danger. Kill a firefighter, they told him, and you go to prison for life.

"Their concern was for their firefighters, and to them, we were a bunch of renegades or something," Ross Curtis said. "All it takes is one gust of wind at the wrong time and it can go sideways on you."

And that, he said, "can be the difference between a good day and a bad day."

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eric.bailey@latimes.com

deborah.schoch@latimes.com