We must keep track of them. It could be New Jersey. Voices, sentiments, the music of the prose, sensibilities of the characters have no peculiarly Western twang. When history doesn't exist, the sense of place is robbed of density, its layered thickness. The land is keenly observed, rendered, it fits, but doesn't exist as a presence apart from its current occupants, informing their shape and vision.
Most characters are wanderers anyway, uprooted, displaced, dispossessed.
When they tell their stories, they're someplace else, achieve a negative transcendence of region. Flora and fauna, woods, plains, streams and mountains, the trailers, motels and occasional Indians are props on a sound stage. The events the speaker wants to explain are complicated indeed and typical of Mr. Ford's intricate fictions, touching as they do on sexual identity, Oedipal conflict, love, death, the possibility of civilized behavior. A young man starts in one direction to find something crucial, gets abruptly turned around and unexpectedly discovers all he was seeking and much more in the very place from which he first departed. He needs to explain, not confess or convince or justify.