There aren’t too many perfect days in Sault Ste. Marie.

The second-biggest city in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, it’s almost always too cold or too gray. In winter, which seems to last an average of eight or nine months, there is too much ice on Lake Superior, too much snow on the ground. Even in summer, which seems to last an average of eight or nine days, chilly winds blow in from the water. If the wind miraculously abates, the black flies and mosquitoes will have their way with your flesh. More often than not, it’s better to be indoors.

This is why there are so many bars in “the Soo” as everyone there calls Sault Ste. Marie (population 14,000 and shrinking), 13 of them within three blocks of one another in a downtown cluster known as the BARmuda Triangle: shot-and-a-beer joints, college bars, places where the Jägermeister and cinnamon whiskey flow and snowmobile trails lead right up to the door. It’s hard to get a suntan in the Soo, but it’s easy to get a drink.

Which is what I was doing when I first encountered Randy Kluck on one of those rare perfect days a couple of years ago. The lingering late-summer sun was silhouetting giant ore freighters as they moved slowly through the Soo Locks, heading from one Great Lake to another. But Randy Kluck was inside, holding court from a corner bar stool at Moloney’s Alley Irish Pub, avoiding the evening sunlight that was poking through the windows on Portage Street. He was bearded, burly and talking to anyone who’d listen about this book he had written with his son Kevin, a 30-year-old graduate of Lake Superior State, the local institution of higher learning from which most of those Jägermeister drinkers come. Randy was doing all the talking. Kevin, slightly embarrassed, was trying not to laugh.

“Take a look at this,” Randy Kluck said, using a line he had obviously used before. “This is the most important travel guide you’ll ever read.”