The name China Lake is indeed a namecheck of the weapons testing facility... The real name of the lake is Lake Melissa, where my aunt and uncle have a summer cabin, but Lake Melissa just didn't sing right somehow. China Lake came into my mind I think because the song was written during the gathering up of forces prior to the Gulf Massacre, and thoughts of high explosive were in the air and in the press. There were articles about these new almost-tactical nuke-sized gasoline spray bombs and their hideous effects. Hence the dream where the protagonist rides the horse of death on the shore as the sky explodes. Also, at this particular summer gathering, my cousin Robert, a Navy Seal (since retired), was there, accompanied by an unsurprising gloom at the task which soon awaited him. (His specialty at the time was under water demolition, a notoriously dangerous profession, and he has a young son) My mother's side of the family is from North Dakota, Fargo, to be precise, and her sister still lives there. Oh, another bomb in the house--my uncle, or my aunt's second husband was a bomber pilot in... Korea? and very voluble on the topic. Anyway, all the talk of huge armies and highexplosive and bombers and Stealth planes and the thought of Robert scuba-diving around, placing mines, (or worse, disarming them), or whatever it was exactly that he was going to be doing, and my uncle talking with great relish of war and the huge cloud of war machine propaganda seeped its way into a peaceful little song about a family gathering, and turned it into a thing of dread and terror. Funny how that happens, isn't it?

I hope I didn't ramble too much there,

Yrs,

David Baerwald