The Orlando Sentinel from Orlando, Florida • Page 11

Sentinel $tar- People Features Comics Television -Orlando, Florida Monday June 8. 1981- WXtWr V'JP' 1 SINK TRAft DEVIL'S MILLHOPPER NATUHC TalC Gainesville's sunken treasure -1 Sir fiS1 in its wetter days been a swimming hole as well as a motorcyclist's testing ground. Now it is a "registered national landmark" fiercely protected by Florida's Division of Parks and Recreation. A plaque on a boulder near the tip of the sinkhole reads: "This site possesses exceptional value as an illustration of the nation's natural heritage and contributes to a better understanding of man's environment." The sinkhole, another sign states, "is one act in nature's continuing drama, called change." But Winter Park sinkhole enthusiasts won't find a replica here of Orange County's newest tourist attraction. Devil's Millhopper is camouflaged by dense vegetation that it's hard to tell it's a hole in the ground at all.

It is, though: 500 feet across, as compared with Winter Park's 355 feet; 120 feet deep, compared with the 100-foot depth Winter Park's hole reached in its early days when it was at its deepest. Magnolia trees covered with lichens mingle with Resurrection ferns and green-fly orchids. Rocks wear caps of moss and liverworts. There are rattlesnake ferns, and a kind of mushroom that's been found in only a few areas east of the Mississippi River. There are 70 species of trees, in fact, and 300 flowering plants.

There is a kind of cran-efly (Polymera rogersiana) found here and nowhere else. There are 100 vertebrates, 46 kinds of reptiles and 50 kinds of birds. All combine into a spectrum of greenness. But it wasn't always so. Devil's Millhopper once belonged to the University of Florida, and students gathered in the crater for parties and dates.

Cars filled with couples visited Devil's Millhopper and fraternities used the hole for secret and scary initiation rites. A 1972 magazine article described the sinkhole bottom as a "garbage dump" filled with beer cans and bottles. "Motorcycles buzz around," it read. Visitors reached bottom by scrambling or sliding down the sides. Others, like Tarzan, clung to the vines and swung, plopping into the shallow pool of water in the bottom.

Erosion was so great that several 55-gallon drums the university kept at the bottom to collect garbage were buried By LAURA KAVESH Santl oat Star GAINESVILLE As far as anyone can tell, no foreign sports cars are buried deep in the sinkhole here named Devil's Millhopper, but then, nobody is around to tell stories of the day it caved in 10,000 years ago, give or take. There are lots of people, though, to recall the motorcyclists who have raced up and down the sinkhole's steep sides in the years since, and to lay claim to the beer cans now becoming aluminum fossils in its bottom. And in the absence of eyewitness reports, there are tales of the beginnings of this vivid green sinkhole in the northwest part of the city, each so much more dramatic than the sinkhole stories of Winter Park. Consider these: Once upon a time, the story goes, a drunk's family cautioned him: Keep drinking and the devil will get you. Not heeding their warning, he maintained his habit and then one day passed out.

The family heard a rumble and the sinkhole appeared where the man used to be. "The devil got him for drinking," it is said. There was once an Indian village near the sinkhole, another story goes, and in it dwelled a beautiful princess very much wanted by the devil. He captured her, taking her to his home in the depths of the sinkhole. When the Indians attempted to rescue her, the devil turned them into the boulders that now freckle the site.

"We're still looking for the princess," it is said. Years ago, according to a third legend, the sinkhole was created when a great herd of cattle was on its way to or from Lake City (no one is certain which.) The weight of the beasts was just too great for the land. In the 1800s, Gainesville residents said the sinkhole looked like a gigantic version of the funnel-shaped "hoppers" used to feed grain into a gristmill. The devil, they decided, had made his lair in the bottom and had dined on the manatees whose bones were found there. Thus the Devil's Millhopper got its name.

Whatever its origins, the Millhopper has been the scene of college students' first dates and midnight revelries. It has after just two months, recalls Helen Hood, a member of Florida Defenders of the Environment. "The students liked to get back to nature in those days," she says. Some people now call those days the time of "sinkhole carnage." The university years, of course, formed just a tiny layer in time. Archaeological finds suggest that Devil's Millhopper is very old.

The upper half may have been formed about 10,000 or 15,000 years ago. The lower part more vertical is probably not more than 1,000 years old. (At one time, of course, between 7 million and 20 million years ago, the sinkhole along with the rest of Florida was just part of the ocean bottom. And the walls of the sinkhole hold fossils from the Miocene period, 25 million years ago.) Before the university took over the sinkhole in the 1950s, it was privately owned. Children used it for adventures, picnics, marshmallow roasts.

Martha Boring, an 82-year-old lifelong Gainesville dweller, remembers leaning over the edge of the mammoth hole and suspending rocks from strings to see when they'd hit bottom. They never did, of course, adding to the place's exotic lure. Sannie Logsdon, an 11-year-old who challenges her friends to race up and down the wooden, winding steps that now connect top with bottom, has heard her parents tell how they climbed down the sides of the sinkhole on their first date. In the mid-'70s, the university deeded the sinkhole to Florida's Division of Parks and Recreation. The boardwalk with 221 steps was installed to keep visitors from climbing the sides of the sinkhole.

And the vegetation began its recovery. slow," Park Ranger Terrence Coulliette says. College students still visit the park, but a gate out front keeps them away at night, and the only place for a picnic is the macadam parking lot. "Once in a while you'll find someone in a Yoga Millhopper, Page 3-B '1. if ttKf ytjf- mm Jt? nL 1 IT)- in, i wilin i i mi nm- illlillli rim.i.,.,.;,),,,, iZ' iFvT r'lllllliini iiiMWMWi1lttiiiiiMllriiiiiiiiiiMiiiM Mll.M UIHW 1,11,1 My.ML, Gainesville's eons-old sinkhole is today a national landmark protected by the state.

Barbara VitalianoSanunal Star Not so wild a dream: She wants to be world's best at chess does it on the chessboard; it doesn't carry over into life. We are very conscious of the danger of arrogance." "I want to be the best chess player in the world," Baraka says, smiling a little at her own chutzpah but obviously meaning what she says. Before she can come even close to that, she has a lot of learning to do, a lot of dead-serious games to play, a lot of experience to accumulate. And a lot of money to spend. "We try to follow the tournament circuit," says her mother, "but it gets very expensive.

For big tournaments, you can have entry fees of $250 to $300. plus travel tickets and out-of-town living expenses for a week. We're being priced out of the tournament market. We're trying to get a little sponsorship a corporate sponsor or an individual patron but so far we have had only a few one-shot contributions." Baraka's winnings are a steady but relatively small income compared with her expenses. The Shabazz family left Alaska when they began to understand Baraka's potential.

By that time, she had won the championship of Anchorage, and there were no worthwhile targets in sight. "There was not much chess in Alaska," says Baraka. "That's why we moved. We stayed in California for two years, and now we have come East. I think the East Coast would be best." Now they are in Washington, considering whether to live here or in New York.

They have been living on savings, with some help from disability payments her fa-, ther receives from an injury suffered in Alaska. If she had been born in the Soviet Union, just across the Bering Strait from Anchorage, Baraka Shabazz would have been discovered years earlier by the effi- cient national chess apparatus; her studies, tournament activity and routine living expenses would be subsi-; dized by the government. In the United States she is simply a very promising young player. Nobody can say yet what her final potential may be, but she is now at about the stage where Bobby Fischer Chess, Page 3-B By JOSEPH MCLELLAN Washington Post WASHINGTON Six p.m. in Dupont Circle, a park here; the pawns cast long shadows across the cement tables in the late-afternoon sunlight.

Baraka Shabazz, 15 years old and not particularly tall, casts an even longer shadow as she goes from table to table, asking if anyone is interested in a game of chess. It isn't as easy now as it was a few weeks ago, back when she was unknown, a chubby little black girt in denim overalls and a green T-shirt, her close-cropped hair concealed under a kerchief, challenging the grown men who play chess in the park. Now she is recognized; she has left a trail of victims. "Baraka?" Paul Glass asks. "Yes, I know Baraka.

The little girl who's a candidate master." Glass, a veteran player in Washington tournaments, is a regular visitor to the Dupont Circle tables. He thought he had seen it all until he met Baraka "I started the first game expecting an easy win," he recalls. "I didn't know what hit me. The second time at least I knew what hit me." It all began a little over three years ago, with cabin fever in Anchorage. It was a few days before Christmas' in 1977.

The Shabazz children, at home on school vacation, were confined indoors by the weather, and their father (who had come to Alaska working on the pipeline) decided he had to do something about it. "He went out and bought us a chess set," Baraka Shabazz recalls, "and he gave it to my sister and me and said. 'Here, play chess." We told him, 'We don't know how to so he showed us how the pieces work and said, 'You have to get your opponent's and that was the first time I played. Six weeks later, February 16, 1978, I entered my first chess tournament and won three games out of five." Since then the pace has been fast and the direction straight up. Baraka has been invited to play in the 1981 U.S.

Women's Championship, which is limited to the 12 top-rated players in the country. That will be in Utah this month and is the first step in the world championship cycle, which produces a winner in 1984. The name of Baraka Shabazz is sixth on the tournament list, and if she had won one more game in the last few months, it would probably be fourth. For a teen-ager who did not know a rook from a knight four years ago, the accomplishment is amazing. Most of the people she plays in chess tournaments are adult white males, and they have trouble taking their opponent seriously when she is a teen-aged black girl.

At least until they notice they are losing. Then they have trouble accepting that fact. "I have had a lot of opponents blow smoke in my face," she says. "They get red in the face, some of them try to cheat and sometimes they knock the pieces over. A few weeks ago, I had an opponent who was drinking coffee out of a Styrofoam cup.

At the beginning he was smiling and relaxed, but then he began nibbling on the cup. By the end of the game, that cup was covered with tooth marks all around the rim. "I remember one tournament where I was playing a 1 7-year-old boy who came in with his mother. He took one look at me and told her, 'You won't have to wait for me; I'll be back in half an After he made a couple of moves, he went over to talk to the tournament director. I saw them looking at my name on the list of players laughing at my name.

Well, instead of getting mad, I thought the best way to handle it was to beat him and to take a long time about it. The game went on for hours, and it kept getting worse for him. Finally I got his queen in a pin; no escape possible. At first, he didn't notice it; he just sat there calmly looking at the board. Then he began to understand the situation, and his face got redder and redder.

Finally he just stuck his arm out and swept all the pieces off the table." "It's a real problem," says her mother, Raqiba Shabazz. "We have raised Baraka, like all our children, to respect her elders, and we have had to impress on her that a chess game is a special situation. She has to challenge them, fight them and beat them. But she only 4 4- rt 4 I 4 A -v ri 1 Washington Post Baraka Shabazz ponders a move in Washington.