Where It All Goes Down
Southern Texas and Rural Mexico, Just After World War II
In All the Pretty Horses, it's all about the land. Land land land.
For all that, however, the land is strikingly barren, consisting mainly of wide expanses of open road, dirt, and ramshackle villages. Our first description of the Texas lands surrounding John's family's ranch is bleak:
"It was dark outside and cold and no wind. […] Dark and cold and no wind and a thin gray reef beginning along the eastern rim of the world." (2, 4)
Not exactly a happening vacation spot.
But this barren world isn't a total loss. As John and Rawlins set off, they ride "out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric." They may be vulnerable in some sense, "loosely jacketed against the cold," but they have "ten thousand worlds for the choosing" (29). Does the bleak land offer possibility, adventure, or danger—or all at once? Like John himself, the land is rugged and spare, but holds hidden potential.
It's All in the Details
The terrain is at turns mysterious and incredibly detailed, all the same and yet each piece is unique. This ambiguity is captured well when the boys first catch sight of Mexico across the Rio Grande:
Far to the south the mountains of Mexico drifted in and out of the uncertain light of a moving cloud-cover like ghosts of mountains […]. The sandbar below them was thickly grown with willow and carrizo cane and the bluffs on the far side were stained and cavepocked and traversed by a constant myriad of swallows. Beyond that the desert rolled as before. (637)
It seems much the same desert as Texas, yet the shifting mountains and the Spanish names of the wild plants nearby seem to suggest uniqueness. It seems a world out of time: despite the novel being set in the mid 20th century, there are no cars to be seen and mud huts abound.
Although such a landscape would seemingly better fit John's unwillingness to enter the modern world (seriously dude, there are washing machines), embodied by his fight against the closing of his ranch, things ultimately don't work out. The class structures of the area and John's go-it-alone ethic are too much at odds, as we'll see in several of the themes explored elsewhere.