It’s rare to be able to trace the birth of an idea to an exact date, but in this case, it was April 13th, 2009.

I was flying home from a family trip to Portugal, wedged in the center seat of the middle row of the airplane. The flight was noisy; there were wailing children all around; and there was barely room to breathe, much less turn the pages of a magazine or a book. I was wide awake, and the entire Atlantic Ocean lay between me and home.

So when the cabin darkened for the in-flight movie, I tore open the earbud packet and plugged myself in. I’d heard of the movie they were showing — a Christmas-season comedy starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston called Marley & Me. The reviews had been lukewarm, but I didn’t really care. I needed the distraction.

The movie, a fictionalized account of columnist John Grogan’s love affair with his incorrigible yellow Lab, was both better and worse than I expected. Worse, in its mawkish manipulation of the audience’s emotions [spoiler alert: the dog dies in the end!]; but better, in its interesting depiction of the life of an op-ed writer.

Grogan doesn’t know he’s a natural-born columnist; he discovers it in the course of trying to be a “serious” journalist. But for Grogan, writing op-eds is more than just a job. He explores how he thinks and feels — in Hollywood jargon, he “finds himself” — by following his curiosity into the world; measuring himself against it; and reporting back the results.

Marley & Me got my wheels spinning. I’d written opinion pieces before, but the focus of my writing was literary fiction. Unlike novels, opinion pieces were time-stamped, disposable things that were consumed and quickly forgotten — unless you happened to be H.L. Mencken, or one of the other masters of the genre.

On the other hand, we’d bought a little property in Landisburg in 2006, and our life on St. Peters Church Road was the source of all sorts of interesting stories…

The very next weekend, I found myself up by Shermans Creek, testing the limits of my truck’s four-wheel drive against Perry County’s thick spring mud.

The mud won. Our neighbor Buddie — who’s appeared in in several of these columns over the years — hauled me out with his tractor. The truck shimmied badly when it was back on the road. A helpful off-duty mechanic diagnosed the condition: big red chunks stuck in my wheels.

I remembered passing a car wash in Shermans Dale, so off I went, only to be turned away by the manager — my truck was too dirty!

At the time, I didn’t know about the clean-water regulations that governed businesses along Shermans Creek, or the difficulties of cleaning buckets of mud from an expensive water reclamation system.

All I knew was that my truck was bouncing my brains out; that the cause was mud in the wheels; and that I was being denied my Constitutional right to bear a jet-powered water wand.

So I wrote about the experience, giving full vent to my tongue-in-cheek outrage. I thickened the lines around the portrait of the car wash manager, turning him into a cartoon to play up the absurdity of a truck that was too dirty to wash. I gave my wife Shana a starring role in the column, which ended with her squeezing under the truck, garden hose in hand, and cleaning out the muddy wheels for me.

I submitted the piece to Wade Fowler, editor of this esteemed newspaper; when he accepted it, I sent him twenty ideas for future pieces. He said, “Write ’em.” I wrote those twenty pieces and kept on going.

This column marks five uninterrupted years of Up at the Creek. That’s 260 op-eds; roughly 220,000 words; or about 850 double-spaced pages.

In other words, about two novels-worth of material.

I’ve used the columns to explore the natural world; history; technology; literature; parenthood; home improvement; futurism — whatever happened to strike me as interesting or newsworthy in a given week. In the beginning, I worried that a weekly deadline would be a fatal distraction to my literary projects. On the contrary, the steady heartbeat of the columns has been a welcome contrast to the process of writing fiction, which seems to operate outside the bounds of time, in a place where deadlines can threaten to stretch to infinity.

The columns have become a kind of public diary — perhaps too public for some. A few weeks ago, my daughter Nina, who has suddenly grown into a formidable young woman, turned to me in the car and said, “By the way, I read your column this morning. I was very insulted!”

Sorry, Nina.

My main regret about the columns dates to that very first piece, the one about the car wash. In my ham-handed effort to play up the irony, I insulted the manager of that car wash — who also happened to be the owner. He was simply doing his job, and if I’d done mine — i.e., proper research — I would have learned his very sensible reasons for turning away my filthy truck.

On the other hand, I might never have written that first column.

So it’s with an apology and a debt of gratitude that I conclude the first five years of Up at the Creek. If I unwittingly offended you in these pages, I’m sorry. And for the opportunity to find myself, week after week, before your very eyes, I say, “Thank you.”