I've always had a fascination with rivers. As a kid, I read all about the great rivers of the world, and my favorite discovery is that some folks believe that the longest river in the world is the length of the Missouri River added to the length of the Mississippi after they merge north of St. Louis. Longer than the Nile, baby!

More interesting to me, however, was the concept of "headwaters," the spot where a river begins. Some rivers have a definitive point of origin. My mom told me about the time she visited Lake Itasca in Minnesota and jumped across the just-formed Mississippi River. As a girl, she had leapt across the same river that was a mile wide when we had crossed at Dubuque! Boggled my mind.

Lake Victoria, of course, is where the Nile begins. And some rivers start where two other rivers come together. The Ohio begins in downtown Pittsburgh where the Allegheny and Monongahela combine. The Missouri officially begins at the confluence of the Jefferson, Madison and (slightly downstream) Gallatin Rivers in western Montana--though serious headwaters freaks consider the origin of the Missouri to sit at Bower's Spring at the head of the Jefferson. The Kansas River is the product of the Smoky Hill and Republican Rivers, which come together near Junction City, Kan.

The first "confluence headwaters" I saw were that of the Kansas. After years of bugging my parents to actually drive through Junction City instead of taking the bypass through nearby Fort Riley, they gave in. I've lived almost all of my post-college days in the Eastern time zone, and I've been though downtown Pittsburgh many times. And trust me, it's still cool every time.

But I've never been to an actual headwaters, the spot where water first pushes out of the ground and starts a river. I've never even been to a lake headwaters. When I was a kid, my family would stay at the family cabin in Ruidoso, N.M. The cabin sat a few feet from the Ruidoso River. The Rio Ruidoso isn't exactly huge (and the river it enters, the Hondo, generally runs out of water well before reaching the Pecos outside of Roswell), but it is a fairly energetic mountain stream within Ruidoso itself. I once tried to hike up to where it begins. I didn't come close.

Running Water Draw sits just north of Clovis, N.M., where I went to high school. Despite the name, this draw is usually dry and generally functions as an arroyo. An arroyo that eventually turns into the Brazos River a couple hundred miles down the way over in Texas. Even though Running Water Draw is, in fact, considered the headwaters of the Brazos, I can't claim it as a sighting. For me, the operative word in headwaters is "waters," not "head."

My boys were out of school on Thursday for Rosh Hashanah. I suggested a trek to the headwaters of Sligo Creek (which runs near our house) and the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia River (which we've biked along a few times).

It turns out that Sligo Creek's spring was paved over years ago. The closest it has to a visible headwaters is a culvert that empties into the creekbed. Not particularly romantic, I suppose, but after an hour or so of poking around the neighborhood, we had to accept it.

The Northwest Branch is much trickier. It splits up into a myriad of small streams at its northern end, and a couple of them run through a golf course development that is so new it is not on our map. All of the milestones listed on the map have changed. But after a bit of wandering around, I spotted a large area of undeveloped land in the midst of McMansions. We got out of the car and headed down into the brush.

After hacking our way through a wall of kudzu and blackberry vines, we found ourselves in a minor forest. A forest carpeted with golf balls, but a forest nonetheless. After a few more minutes, we found an indention in the land where water obviously flows from time to time. But not right then. So we kept walking downhill.

We skirted an area guarded by stands of six-foot-tall Japanese stilt grass and made our way back to the cut. This time, there was a small quantity of running water. All we had to do was whack our way through that (very) tall grass and we might find us some headwaters.

I'm lucky in that my boys are somewhat susceptible to the notion of an "adventure." Less imaginative lads might have been put out by our nearly aimless wandering through tall weeds and thickets. But Max and Sam were pretty much enthralled, especially since it involved picking up all sorts of golf balls. Adventures require the acquisition of treasure, you see.

So we doubled back, whacked our way back to the nascent stream and found the headwaters. There was a large mud pit held back by some rocks, with a small trickle of water issuing forth between the rocks. I declared this point to be one of the headwaters of the Anacostia.

My boys were excited. Max rolled down a few golf balls to "mark the point," and we somewhat slowly (but triumphantly) made our way back to the car. We all flushed with a sense of accomplishment.

In the days since, I've discovered that there is an accepted headwaters for the Northwest Branch, and that we were about a mile from that point. That's okay with me. I saw water running out of the ground, water that eventually would make its way down to the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia, and from there to the full Anacostia, the Potomac, Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. In a very real sense, I had traveled to a point where a river began. That's pretty cool.

Some of the most important things parents can pass on to their children are pieces of themselves. I don't think that Max or Sam quite understood why I was so insistent about this expedition, but they enjoyed it--and more importantly, they enjoyed it with me. In every important way, that's what being a parent is all about.

Jon Worley would like his ashes scattered at the headwaters of the Missouri. He doesn't much care if the actual location is Bower's Spring or the confluence of the Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin. One way or another, bits and pieces of him will be spread across a large swath of the United States. And that's pretty cool.