Rinker Buck is as fine a storyteller as anyone writing today. His most recent book, “Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure,” chronicles his trip down the Mississippi River in a modern version of a flatboat. As he passed one mile marker after another, he wrote about history, culture and church ladies — and fear.

As we pass the marker evidencing the end of 2022 and the beginning of a new year, I am marking the occasion and resolving to make my journey without fear.

Buck’s first book, “Flight of Passage,” tells of the cross-country flight he and his brother made in a tiny airplane during the 1960s. That, and his story of traveling the Oregon Trail in a wagon, makes the theme of journey complete.

The point of his work is to look at who we once were and who we have now become as a nation. It shows that fear — usually fear of things that are not real or are not threatening — is a common handicap among us.

Mississippi River “experts” told him that he’d never be able to navigate the highly industrialized river. They said he’d vanish into a whirlpool or be crushed beneath a behemoth towboat’s string of barges.

He navigated around the river traffic with a mixture of understanding, cooperation, communication and respect. When he did meet that whirlpool, he went across it without so much as a sputter of his outboard motor.

The evil and danger of things or events are real for those who fear them. However, Buck showed how the fear many had for the river was unfounded. Sure, a river that large is a dangerous place, and there are plenty of hazards. The fear, however, is often overblown and irrational.

The people he met along the way were certainly charming. His description of a church picnic makes you almost taste the potato salad. There was a fear monger there, too, who ranted at Buck about all of the evil and danger in anyone different than the fine folk who spread out the fried chicken, iced tea and carrot cake. (His rendering of the man’s tough little church-lady wife shutting him up with a, ‘Honey, shut your pie trap,’ is priceless.”)

Far upstream, the country folks who visited the boat could not believe that Buck was not armed. They warned of the crowds of “evil black thugs” who roamed the cities downstream. Without a stash of firearms and ammo, they would descend on the boat and do whatever it is that “evil black thugs” supposedly do.

Downstream, when Buck and his party tied up near Baton Rouge, he invited a group of young black kids aboard. They were just as afraid as the rednecks up stream, and also feared the Cajuns who populate the lower Mississippi.

“Them Cajuns down there is going to murder your ass! You need some guns!”

But it’s not about guns. It’s about fear.

We Americans have spent several years now wallowing in fear of one another. It has hurt all of us and tarnished the reputation we have had for being a people who look at our faults and correct our mistakes.

For me, 2023 is going to be a year without fear. I am going to pass the 2022 mile post in this river and put aside the paranoid fear mongering that has just about destroyed us.

The Mississippi River is — like most rivers, and like life itself — full of snags, sandbars and unpredictable traffic. Navigating it requires skill. So does life. More than that, life requires us to come to grips with what’s real and true, rather than what we are persuaded to be afraid of.

Rinker Buck marked the end of his trip at the Audubon Park boat landing on the Mississippi. He made his trip by learning to understand the mighty river, by using good judgment and by never, ever, taking counsel of what others told him to fear.

As I start 2023, I believe we must all do the same.

Frances Coleman is a former editorial page editor of the Mobile Press-Register. Email her at [email protected] and “like” her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/prfrances.