Dad has a certain talent for understating what's wrong with things. Even when he says what's wrong, he'll almost never say how wrong it really is.
His hometown is like... something rotting from the inside. It's really beautiful, with the mountains and the river and everything, but if you look past what's pretty, it's a dead thing. There's no growth, no wealth, no real joy... a few scattered monuments feel like someone gives a damn, but it's not the people who live there. It's like a breathing corpse of a town. The most alive things there are the pawn shops and... they made his old factory into a museum of modern art. It's right next to the train station, though, so people come up by train, take a short stroll over to see the museum, and walk right back, never set foot in the town itself.
People subsist there... they survive... it seems they rarely live. It's all hicks with deer rifles in trailers and cheap housing to cut down on food costs who live off gas station grocery basics and spend their savings on lottery tickets. I can't imagine how utterly hopeless it would have been 50 years ago when dad lived there. I don't think there's a movie theater or anything really artistic except the factory now. We saw a dance studio, but it was as run-down and tiny and neglected as everything else there.