In San Diego, working in an office that overlooked Embarcadero Park, I could look out the window and see an aircraft carrier drifting by, slow and silent as a storm cloud. I never got down to the sea while I was there, to watch turquoise walls of water crashing on the rocks at La Jolla.
But in San Diego you never get away from the ocean. It's there in the air, in the cultural spice of seaport flavors, in the misty morning oceanside light itself.
In Chicago, my room overlooked a pie-shaped panorama of Lake Michigan, where sails littered the blue horizon like leaves floating on a pond. Every day I walked out on Navy Pier, past a mile of shops, restaurants and excursion boats, or down the long, wide sidewalk that separates empty miles of open water from soaring skyscrapers that crowd against the shore as if they're elbowing their way to the front for a better view.
There's plenty to see. Museums and parks line Lakeshore Drive, even an occasional white-sand beach tucked away like an oasis in a desert of asphalt.
Cincinnati has water too. There's even a dollar's worth of green space down there along the riverbank. But mostly, we treat the Ohio the way other cities treat their railroad tracks - a necessary nuisance that makes a convenient dumping ground for warehouses, parking lots, junkyards, old tires and piles of gravel.
The trouble is, most cities' railroad tracks are out of sight. Our river is our front yard - and it lacks what real estate agents call ''curb appeal.''
OK, so the Ohio River is not the Pacific Ocean. Cincinnati is not a seaport - or even a lakeport like Chicago. But the Ohio is not the empty sand washes and concrete irrigation gulches that pass for rivers in Arizona. It has majesty and history. It has moods that swing from sparkling metallic blue on a summer morning to muddy-Mississippi brown in the spring and frostbite gray in the winter.
And we can take better care of what we have. It might even lift our mood.
In Chicago, local politics is moth-eaten with corruption and daily scandals, home of nationally famous jailbirds like Dan Rostenkowski. And the locals seem to love it. They take pride in trudging through it like so much dirty frozen slush in another brutal winter. They wear it like a badge of honor, a bottomless cup of morning-coffee humor.
Cincinnati cringes in the shadows, too embarrassed to show its face because the Bengals are pitiful or city council is imbecilic or Marge Schott mouths off again with another profound observation, such as that kids are better off smoking cigarettes than crack.
San Diego heaves and lurches through its own cultural earthquakes, trying to absorb the flood of immigrants spilling over the Mexican border as fast as it soaks up arrivals from the near east (Ohio) and far east (Hong Kong). But even the cops I talked to credited their city's excitement and optimism to the strength and creativity of cultural diversity.
Cincinnati often has all it can handle to tiptoe over the broken glass in the no-man's land dividing whites and blacks. Diversity in Cincinnati is the first white woman to get a tee time at a private country club, the first black man on the Cincinnati Business Committee.
Chicago walks with a bounce in its step, a sparkle in its eye that says whatever happens - fire, flood, freeze or police riots - we'll survive and laugh it off tomorrow.
San Diego loves to look in the mirror at its own laid-back, friendly charm, while underneath it's out-hustling the whole California coast as the new American anchor on the Pacific Rim.
Cincinnati seems to be constantly flinching, asking, ''What is it this time?'' What national humiliation must we endure next? Those Latin words on our city seal probably mean, ''Now what?''
We can't fix it with aircraft carriers or move next to a Great Lake. But we could quit bickering and make our river a source of local pride with a new ballpark and leafy pedestrian green spaces that link it to downtown.
We can't spice up our bland melting pot overnight, but we can stop leaving it on the back burner until it boils over.
Maybe what we need to build most is more civic self-esteem.
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. If you have questions or comments, call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
