Yes , it is an actual place. Picturesque even.
He would probably laugh at the irony, but this picture made me think of that song ‘Bridge Over troubled Water’. Yeah I KNOW about Simon and Garfunkel. That’s what makes it funny in a sad way. It’s just a sad yet beautiful song. And no, this isn’t about making YJ a ‘folk-hero’ or any other nonsense like that.
A couple different versions of the song-
Johnny Cash and Fiona Apple-
http://ikonaphotos.blogspot.com/2008/03/along-yankee-jims-road-placer-county.html
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=Yankee%20Jim’s%20Road&w=all&s=int
The Spoils of War 
Good find on the street name-
One of the things I liked about him was that his writings always felt human, real, not like polished propaganda.
My only communication with him was via email, so maybe it’s meaningless and pointless, I don’t know, but I miss the guy.
RIP, Yankee Jim.
Heh, not far from me! Man this heat is nuts. KCRA is saying we need to turn off all non-essentials because of the power load. And tomorrow (Wed) is only going to be worse. Those poor folks in the foothills get a double whammy…high ozone and the draft of the worse air quality late in the day. :(
Heh, at first I thought that first one was Joy Division’s Atmosphere…..Equally appropriate for our race I guess, sadly.
I miss him too. We didn’t talk all that many times, we wrote . I can see now how much he sublimated much of what he was feeling, whether it was warmth, pain- whatever -justifiable or not, following the rules- or not.
I miss him too. What strikes me probably most is just that-the vast crevasse between how he *consistently* presented himself to me and the lurking anger on the other side that I never saw.
He was not slow-unlike many people , he could figure out things on his own- he knew I was far from perfect- but said I had a good heart – called me a pagan but at the same time didn’t equate that with being a Judas- he was empathetic,kind- and it was real- without agenda- faked, contrived.
Having to be stoic and put up a good face for a long time produces such cognitive dissonance that can lead to a kind of madness. Some find some kind of release/escape in creative/athletic/work/friends/projects (or drink, drugs, etc), but sometimes even those things are not enough.