Jack Reacher Author Lee Child Loves His Wyoming Home, But ...

It was several years ago when Jack Reacher novelist Lee Child threw the towel in on New York City’s hectic urban life.

He had tired of a mass of robotic people rushing around with ear pods listening to music, traffic jammed streets, rumbling subways and all the gritty stuff that goes along with living in a dense metropolitan city with more than 8 million people.

The British transplant wanted serenity and a slower pace of life than walking from Battery Park in the Big Apple’s financial district to Penn Station near the Empire State Building in Midtown Manhattan, slipping underneath scaffolding along blocks of crowded sidewalks or trying to hold his breath to escape whiffs of exhaust coughed out from traffic jammed streets.

Eight years ago, Child — the pen name for Jim Grant — packed up his belongings and moved to Tie Siding in Wyoming’s southeastern Albany County, along with his wife and daughter.

It seemed like a big jump across country, but not for Child.

He kept his New York City digs, but also has homes in Fort Collins, Colorado, and London.

The rustic two-story cabin he bought a few miles south of Tie Siding is sandwiched in the middle of patches of ponderosa pines, with a 6-mile-long dirt and gravel road that leads to his sanctuary built at 8,000 feet elevation in the foothills of the Medicine Bow Mountains.

“I bought the home in 2016, and I did it for a personal reason. I’m an immigrant to the country. I have no in-built loyalty to one area versus another area,” the writer said. “For a long time, I lived in New York City, and I just wanted to experience the total contrast, which is obviously Wyoming, going from the most densely populated place to the least densely populated place.”

Child, who was born in Coventry in central England, said that he also wanted to better understand the cowboy way of life.

“I wanted to understand what Western living was like and experience it,” he said. “I liked that specific house (near Tie Siding) because out the back has a view of the plains, and out in the front there is a view of the beginning of the Rocky Mountains.

“It was poised in exactly a very interesting spot.”

Things were going smoothly for the author for a year or so after the move, but then came a proposal from wind developers to build a $500 million wind farm project with more than 100 turbines in the Laramie Plains in the valley below his home.

The 504-megawatt Rail Tie development, which is expected to cover more than 26,000 acres of the Laramie Plains on the northern and southern sides of U.S. Highway 287, is backed by Spanish energy giant Repsol.

But it was the predecessor company ConnectGen, a private equity backed alternative energy company based in Houston, that first introduced itself to Child before selling the project to Repsol in March.

Amateur Hour

In Child's first meeting with ConnectGen executives in 2017 to discuss the project, he met them was at a local coffee shop.

“They struck me as being incredibly amateur, just two local individuals who were not impressive. It felt like a trial balloon, and financing wasn’t certain,” he said. “The main thing is that they needed a contract with somebody who would buy the electricity, and they didn’t have that. They still don’t have that. It seemed very half-baked to me from the very beginning.”

Child’s main beef over the project is its industrialization of the prairies anchored with agricultural and residential land.

“To me, Rail Tie represents cheap and lazy and looking for a subsidy rather than anything new and meaningful,” Child told Cowboy State Daily.

“I am not at all opposed to alternative energy — wind energy, solar or whatever they can come up with,” Child said. “You know, they call Wyoming the Saudi Arabia of wind. And it seems like a total no-brainer, but what bothers me specifically about Rail Tie is that it’s just a dumb idea in a stupid place.”

Attempts to develop wind projects below Child’s home in the 4,300-acre Fish Creek Ranch Preserve have been going on for nearly two decades.

It’s not a new concept for locals who’ve lived in the area.

Walking along Child’s front porch that overlooks the Laramie Plains, the 345-volt Ault-Craig transmission lines can be spotted on the horizon several miles in the distance.

The lines represent a cash register for their owner, the Western Area Power Administration.

WAPA is the power marketing administrator in the western United States for the U.S. Department of Energy that markets hydroelectric power from federal dams operated by the Bureau of Reclamation and other agencies.

It’s what Rail Tie's owners want to connect their wind farm project into.

The line is what brought energy companies knocking on Child’s door nearly seven years ago.

First it was Shell WindEnergy Inc. that proposed the wind project on the Laramie Plains, then Houston-based ConnectGen took it over, and now Repsol.

Love At First Sight

Child said that he fell in love with Tie Siding at first sight.

“I’m in an out all the time. We see moose — obviously — bears, elk, antelope, jackrabbits, chipmunks, everything,” Child said. “It’s a long, long winter where you don’t see much, but then you have this glorious summer that’s maybe 15 weeks long where it’s just gorgeous, and you see all this stuff, which is fascinating. For a city person that is wonderful.”

Child said that he is worried about the disruption that construction will cause when it finally begins. Repsol executives have vowed that they are preparing to begin work on the project next spring.

“There will be many, many years of construction. Because you’ll have to truncate the construction season because of weather. It’ll be many, many years of insane obstruction where they’re proposing these offshore maritime turbines, which are truly gigantic,” Child said.

“Each one of them will be three times larger than the current tallest building in Wyoming,” he said.

Wyoming's tallest building is White Hall at the University of Wyoming. Located in Laramie roughly 25 miles to the north of Child’s home, the 146-foot-tall office building has 12 floors.

The towering wind turbines that Repsol wants to build will approach 500 feet tall.

“Their blades will be hundreds and hundreds of feet long, and there will be at least 900 blades that need to be delivered, which in practical terms will mean closing [U.S. Highway 287] for hours at a time,” Child said. “It will mean rebuilding Cherokee Park Road [leading to Child’s home] to carry the weight. The disruption will be intense.

“I’m not a scared, pearl clutcher, but that is our only way in and out. If we need an ambulance or need to get to the hospital, the road is blocked for hours and we’re stuck. It’ll be a nightmare.”

The 69-year-old Child is bothered by the timeline for construction over several years.

“I’m an old guy who doesn’t have that many years left, and so I don’t want to spend a proportion of that with construction going on all around in a very inconvenient place,” said Child, who is in the process of handing off the writing of the Jack Reacher novels to his younger brother, Andrew Grant.

Andrew and his novelist wife Tasha Alexander also have a home on the preserve and are supportive of efforts to fight Rail Tie.

Alexander writes historical mystery fiction novels and gained notoriety for her Lady Emily series.

Not Selling

Child said that he isn’t interested in selling his property.

“I don’t feel good about that because, really, the only practical way to sell it would be to lie to the purchaser and just not mention the upcoming upheaval,” he said. “I’m going to keep it in the hopes that I can survive whatever happens. I’m not a NIMBY (not in my backyard). I believe in alternative energy, but I also believe in doing things properly and to find a massive new site where they could have a project that is a state-of-the-art facility. This would be preferrable. But to do it in a residential area is just silly.”

Child also had harsh comments for the state of Wyoming’s shortcoming to come up with a balanced approach to energy generation projects without consideration of where those projects might be built.

“They’re worried about extractive industries. They worry about more money coming in, so they’re basically rubber-stamping anything, and they don’t care whether it’s done with all the T’s crossed and the I’s dotted,” he said. “They’re just nodding it through in the hopes that somewhere down the road they’re going to get the promised benefits for the county and state.

“But given the disarray of Rail Tie’s proposal, you’ve got to be an idiot to expect any of that to come true.”

Child is saddened that the Rail Tie project may one day come to despoil so many of his pleasant memories made at his Tie Siding home.

The COVID pandemic lockdown of the world beginning in March 2020 was a great time for Child, his wife and daughter as they were able to shelter in the Tie Siding home without contact from the outside.

“We were just left alone for eight months, and we lived organically, naturally with the landscape through the bad weather, through the good weather,” he said. “I understand that the pandemic was a horror for a lot of people, but I loved every minute of it because we were there.”

Picking Sides

The state of Wyoming and Repsol reject Child’s position on wind farm development.

In fact, the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality’s (DEQ) regulatory body that oversees where utility-sized projects get built recently rubber-stamped the Rail Time project at a July review hearing on Repsol’s “financial adequacy.”

The DEQ’s Industrial Siting Council ruled in a unanimous 5-0 vote at the July hearing that Repsol could move forward with the controversial Rail Tie wind farm development because it had followed proper steps to complete the construction.

Caton Fenz, CEO of Repsol’s Renewable North American business, told Cowboy State Daily that the cost of the project is likely to rise in line with an 18% inflation rate as compared to when the project was originally penciled out years ago.

Fenz said that Repsol plans to submit an amendment to its permit to build the project before the end of September that outlines the new costs and revised construction dates.

“Hopefully, we’ll have it in operation in 2026,” he said. “We have the resources to be compliant with the regulations to build and decommission and reclaim the project,” Fenz said. “Should additional resources be required, we also have access to the strength of Repsol.

Wyoming Characters

Fighting wind farm developers doesn’t consume everything Child does in Wyoming.

Living in the area has given Child some local experiences, including a few visits to Laramie’s raucous Buckhorn Bar and Parlor, infamous for a 1971 shooting and a bullet hole left behind in a cracked mirror behind the bar from a hunting rifle fired by an irate man who was upset with a married woman’s dating habits.

A few characters in his Jack Reacher series have some traits that he’s tapped from the Buckhorn, known by locals as “buckass.”

“I go in there, not often, but there were two things that intrigued me,” he said. “There’s a huge mirror on the back of the bar with a bullet hole, where some guy shot somebody who was sleeping with his wife, and the bullet hole is still there.

Mary Hopkins, who co-owns the Buckhorn, doesn’t know him.

“I never heard of him,” Hopkins said. “Once in a blue moon I might be there after 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and I’m sure he’s not there at 8 in the morning.”

Child’s interest in the bar also was piqued by “two or three old guys” sitting alone at a little table.

“You get a feeling that they know the history of the county, the gossip and what’s going on in town,” he said. “I did reach out to speak with one of those people about the landscape around there, about what’s going on, but they’re not named in any way. That’s the kind of character you find in those bars, an older person with no work and just sits there and reminisces.”

He also wrote a few of the Jack Reacher novels while tucked inside the Tie Siding home.

“I wrote a couple of the books there, including one called ‘The Midnight Line,’ which is really a homage to Wyoming,” he said. “It’s a Wyoming-set novel based on my experiences there. You know, Reacher is a guy who can be anywhere and do anything, so to take him out there seems like a kind of natural habitat.”

He said there weren’t any major characters in the novels based on people from Wyoming.

“There are a lot of minor people that Reacher comes across along the way that are based on people that I’ve known or seen or dealt with, and so they pop up in random places. It’s more of the landscape and the sort of towns and the absence of towns,” said Child, who highlighted the Buckhorn in a “pretty true-to-life” description in “The Midnight Line.”

He also made an opaque reference to U.S. Highway 287.

“The whole aspect of that road being the in and out artery is emphasized. That’s my Wyoming book, and I really liked it. It came out well,” he said.

“The Midnight Line” was released in November 2017. The plot finds Reacher in the Midwest investigating the illegal opioid trade and the pharmaceutical companies that often turn a blind eye in the name of profits, and the people dependent on them.

Alan Ritchson Does It

In the stories, Jack Reacher was a major and crack investigator in the U.S. Army's military police. After leaving the service, Reacher roams the country, taking odd jobs investigating suspicious and dangerous situations, and resolving them.

As of late 2023, there were 28 novels and short stories in the Reacher series.

There are two Jack Reacher films that star Tom Cruise as Reacher: “Jack Reacher” (2012) from the ninth novel “One Shot,” and “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back” (2016) from the 18th novel “Never Go Back.”

Jack Reacher novels have also been adapted for a hugely popular television series on Amazon Prime Video, starring the 6-foot, 2-inch-tall Alan Ritchson, nearly the same size as the 6-foot, 5-inch, 250-pound Reacher from the novels.

“We had a lot of pushbacks with Tom Cruise as Reacher because physically he did not represent the reality of Reacher,” said Child of the 5-foot, 7-inch Cruise. “With the series, we found the perfect guy and he is living up to it.”

“He’s a good actor. I have watched a couple of them,” Child said.

Child said he’s not certain if there is more writing on the horizon.

“Ah, yeah, that could be a rebound thing. At the moment, I’m happy just to be contemplating retirement,” he said. “Retirement is a weird thing. You sometimes can’t deal with it. You have to go back to doing something.

“So, I’m going to take a break for a couple of years, and that will sort of rinse my mind. And maybe then, yeah, maybe something will come.”

Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com.