EVANSTON, Ill. — Once in a blue moon, I step foot into a city that’s somehow, someway, just too damn fancy for me to relate to.

Evanston is one of them.

Without again dwelling too long on my rural upbringing, I spent most of my childhood in a log cabin home — a quarter-mile off the road and with neighbors too far away to walk and visit. My town (“New Pal-es-TEEN”) had about 1,500 people when I moved there, and two, maybe three stoplights by the time I left. Our family home was surrounded by corn fields on three sides, and a horse farm on the other. My idea of a good time was shooting hoops on a $70 basketball rim from Wal-Mart, and hanging out in the abandoned school bus in our backyard.

Evanston, however, is a veritable Shangri-La on a crystalline beach on Illinois’ North Shore. The homes here are mansions and estates, and every piece of landscaping is flawlessly manicured. On one side of the road, a century-old cathedral. And on the other, the purest lakeside sands God could have ever dreamed of.

Each building is historic and pristine — including the Graduate Evanston I’m staying at, which originally opened as “The Homestead,” a hybrid hotel-apartment built in 1928. So perhaps it makes sense I’m taking up a short-term, 5-day residency here to fuel my writing, but I feel completely out of my element.

The open patio has eight classic rocking chairs, and the first-floor hotel lobby has a fine bar with padded leather booths and brass lighting fixtures. My room has classic antique furniture, including a wooden wardrobe and an upholstered corner chair, as well as polished headboards and tapered quilts.

Sources more informed than me say this 8-floor structure was built “in the Colonial Revival style, which was used on many other apartments from the era in Evanston. The design includes a verandah supported by Doric columns along the front facade, two projecting three-bay windows, brick quoins, and a dentillated cornice with a pediment.”

Folks, don’t you just love a dentillated cornice with a pediment? And how about those unforgettable brick quoins?

I’m not trying to be needlessly snide or sarcastic in the name of content (and the expense of a genuinely stunning lakeside neighborhood). But I hope it illustrates just how out-of-place I feel here.

Tuesday was my first night in Evanston, and I hoped to find its local version of my favorite haunts, like a dive bar or live music venue. Maybe I could sneak over into the city and find some greasy burgers and a few quarters of the NBA Finals.

Well, there are gastropubs. Farm-to-table restaurants. And there’s upscale American fare in a chic, modern setting. If you’re fond of salvaged wood as a statement piece, there’s more than enough to go around. And you can expect a pulled-pork sandwich (with fries) to start at $15.

The closest thing Evanston seems to have up my alley is the Celtic Knot Public House, a “rollicking” tavern with Irish fare, located in “The Carlson Building,” which makes me expect it will be more of the regal living the royal-purple neighborhood offers.

Maybe this is the culture shock setting in after Iowa City and Madison, Wisc., — two cities culturally similar to my own in hometown Bloomington — but it feels like more of an uphill battle to find local culture without breaking the travel bank.

After Tuesday’s bumpy departure from Wisconsin, there was nothing I wanted more than some cheap eats, so I ultimately settled for (nay, jumped head-first into) two pepperoni Stouffer’s French Bread pizzas and an ice-cold can of Old Style.

There’s a saying that my housemate Miranda and I toss around a lot when we feel inadequate around well-to-do people or places: “we hate ’em ’cause we ain’t ’em.” Evanston, probably, inevitably, surely fits snugly in that portion of my heart. Maybe I just don’t relate because this sort of place is meant for higher societal flyers than I am.

And there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s personally jarring.

On Tuesday evening, I walked eastward to Clark Street Beach to get a sight of Lake Michigan, and scope out the inevitable shoreline hangs. Everyone in the surrounding neighborhood was thoughtfully dressed, with businessmen in well-tailored dress shirts and joggers top-shelf athletic gear, walking a boutique dog breed or enjoying a quaint picnic (with an actual tablecloth) in the nearby Dawes Park.

It made me think of Brave New World, the classic dystopian sci-fi novel/sociological narrative by Aldous Huxley, in which citizens are pre-programmed into five descending strata: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. The Alphas are handsome and voluptuous are cunningly intelligent at their penthouse jobs, and the Epsilons are dwarfish and stupid and serve the Alphas, and generally can’t tie a shoe to save their life. Everyone else is thusly gifted or disadvantaged to some physical or mental benchmark in between.

Walking down Church Street, I felt like a Beta-minus or Gamma-plus fortunate enough to step into the rarest bubble of Alpha society. I thought, this is where the thinkers and doers must live. The thriving upper crust that everyone could or should strive to someday reach.

Frankly: I felt ugly. I felt fat. I felt stinky and bloated and unsophisticated and poor. Maybe that’s life-out-of-a-suitcase for you, but my discomfort, in a way, is an incredible compliment to the neighborhood.

I feel out of place, like I committed felony breaking-and-entering by parking my vaporwave pickup truck in the municipal garage.

I knew that the real experiences I seek on this trip — or, the ones that feel most authentic and engaging to people like me — would be found down the Purple Line in actual Chicago, as even the third-largest city in the United States would provide enough relatable shops and restaurants to folks like me, who clip coupons and research parking in advance.

Or maybe this is “a real experience,” and it’s just wholly alien to me, and something I need to keep my mind open to, like I did when I visited the gritty, yet opulent streets of Detroit.

Different is good. Different is compelling.

Certainly, there is a lot of valid history to be found in Evanston: Of course, there’s Northwestern University, a fine diamond of higher education, and home of Patten Gymnasium, which hosted the first NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Game (Oregon beat Ohio State, 46-33) in 1939.

Evanston was also home to the Women’s Temperance Alliance, founded in March 1874, the nation’s first organization of local women to the temperance cause — influencing Evanston’s legal standing as a dry city from 1858 until 1972. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union National Headquarters has called Evanston home since 1900, and still operates here today.

The strongly Methodist neighborhood also hosted the second-ever (and only United States) World Council of Churches assembly, leading to its nicknames “Heavenston” and “The City of Churches.”

And in March of this year, Evanston became the first city in the U.S. to offer reparations to African-American households, coming in the form of a $25,000 credit on home downpayments, mortgage payments, or repairs.

Undoubtedly, this is a place where important things happen, historic decisions are made, and people look out for the welfare of their neighbors.

But I feel like the spoiled kid at the adult’s dinner table, expecting something like chicken nuggets and ketchup when the matriarchs and patriarchs around me are enjoying shrimp cocktail and foie gras.

What does that mean for my stay in Evanston, and what I ultimately take from it? I don’t know. And I probably won’t know until a few days after I leave this place. And it’s an experience I’ll probably have to face more in the final stretch of the trip, through Charlottesville, Va.; Richmond, Va.; and Chapel Hill, N.C.

But the essence of experience means accepting the realities of things both above me and below me — it’s just rare that I find myself on the severely elevated side of that paradigm. As the weekend approaches, maybe I’ll find the wallet space (and dress code) to venture out into town to see how the “other half” lives.

Even if I’m snarfing down soggy, microwaved pizza bread and chugging cheap beers in my hotel room in the meantime.

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-moose

PS: The kind people behind the Graduate brand left me another swag bag upon check-in here, and I’m quite fond of the tasteful gifts. I’m a huge fan of soft, collegiate T-shirts, as well as pennant design culture, so this Northwestern-purple tote bag containing the heather tee and a soft notebook were a treat to find in my room.