Where It All Goes Down
Texas-Mexico Border, 1980
The border is a wild place, and the book's setting is almost as much of a character as the human players. The tumultuous lawlessness of the border lends the novel its modern Western feeling. How modern? Well, thanks to Chigurh's coin, we know the book is set in 1980. His coin is from 1958, and "It's been traveling twenty-two years" (2.4.77).
The environment is often a source of both solace and unsettling foreboding. At one point Bell "rose and stood looking out over the country" (3.3.157). Ah, that's relaxing. Llewelyn Moss does the same later on in the same chapter. Traveling from one seedy motel to another gets dull after a while, so Llewelyn needs to seek comfort in nature. He goes to a lake, where he "watched the land turn blue and cold. An osprey went down the lake. Then there was just darkness" (3.3.294). Later in the book, Wells also gets comfort from nature when "he took out his camera and snapped a picture of the sky, the river, the world" (6.2.15). Of course, he dies soon afterward.
So maybe nature isn't that comforting, after all. In addition to hosting gunslinging drug runners, it's full of scorpions and Mohave rattlesnakes. In this way, nature is sometimes used as metaphor for evil—and by evil we mean Anton Chigurh. Even before Chigurh starts to shadow Llewelyn, we're told that "[s]omewhere out there was the shadow of Moss himself" (1.3.2). The text means a shadow literally, but the same could be applied to Chigurh's nature as a dark stalker.
If we were in this country, we'd be watching our backs and hightailing it out of Texas.