For more than 40 years, he has loved her.

When he's close to her and even when he's far away, the thought of her makes his heart dance.

(ENLARGE)

Claude Terry helped get the Chattooga River on the protected list in '74 and has been honored for his efforts.

Even in his old age, he finds joy in simply looking at her as she flows freely through the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Once she turned him upside down but it didn't matter. That just made him love her all the more.

Few rivers were as beautiful or deadly or cold.

Claude Terry remembered the Chattooga River running through national forests, her big whitewater rapids dropping hard and fast into the Tugaloo.

She wasn't the first river he loved. The first was the Obed, which he discovered on an outing with friends.

Let's go run it again, he suggested.

Your knees are bleeding, one of them said to him. You won't be going in my boat.

Terry jumped in an inner tube and headed back into that cold embrace.

"I came up beaten up and bloodied," he remembered the other day at his home in Atlanta. "Laughing my head off."

And that's when he knew he loved rivers.

Then in the spring of 1968, when a young man's fancy always turns to thoughts of love, Terry saw the Chattooga.

He was in his 30s, and God knows how old Chattooga was. But even then, she was considered the premier whitewater destination in the Southeast.

"The moment I saw her, I loved her," he said. "She was my harsh mistress."

Terry, a native of Cumming, was 15 when he first learned to swim, and he swam a lot, mostly in a nearby stock pond with cows. A year later, he headed to Lee College in Cleveland, Tenn.

"Every weekend I'd sneak off and thumb a ride up to Ocoee River to swim the rapids," he said.

He graduated from Lee in 1958, then the University of Chattanooga and the University of Georgia, where he received a doctorate in microbiology.

In between classes at Emory University, where he was an assistant professor until 1974, he passed his love for rivers onto his three kids. Weekends were always reserved for the water, particularly the Chattooga.

But the Chattooga was a "studied" river, a kind of stepchild to those on the more elite federal list of wild and scenic rivers.

That fact just about broke Terry's heart, and he spent the next five years trying to get his beloved Chattooga on that list, an effort that needed congressional approval.

After Terry gave a presentation on the Chattooga to a Trout Unlimited meeting in the early 1970s, he was approached by a member the audience. It was Lewis King, the model for Lewis Medlock in the then-unproduced movie "Deliverance."

If you really want to save the Chattooga, he told Terry, he should try to put her in the movie. That conversation led to producers asking Terry to consult for the movie — and double for actor Jon Voight — and it gave the Chattooga a supporting role in the movie.

At the 1972 premiere in Atlanta, then-Gov. Jimmy Carter asked Terry to take him to the Chattooga, and sure enough Carter fell in love with her, too. He told Terry he'd do what he could to help protect her.

About that time, Terry realized there was no organization dedicated to protecting wild and scenic rivers. He and a group of his friends decided to start American Rivers Conservation Council, now American Rivers, a nonprofit dedicated to the protection and restoration of North American rivers.

With the money he made from "Deliverance," he bought gear, rafts, paddles and life jackets and with his friend Doug Woodward opened Southeastern Expeditions.

When he wasn't in the classroom, the two of them took people down the river in rafts, some 10,000 each year until selling the venture last year.

In 1974, Terry's work was rewarded when the Chattooga was added to the list of protected, scenic rivers, in part because of Carter's involvement.

In 1977, Terry left the American Rivers board but continued his work on behalf of rivers. Last month, the organization honored him for his conservation efforts.

The 71-year-old grandfather isn't able to kayak whitewater anymore. He was recently diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. That doesn't mean, he said, he doesn't take a swim with her as often as he can.

"When you're in the river, you have to dance with the lady," he said. "You can't quit."

Terry can't dance anymore, but at least he knows his mistress is protected for future generations.

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