Kingsbridge resident explores a world of ice and the Inuit

As the year ended at public schools throughout New York City, a group of PS 81 students gathered for a pool party at the Skyview apartment complex in North Riverdale. Marcos Anderson, Erik Bishop and Mark Anthony Graham ­— all rising sixth graders ­— jump in the water together. Photo by Karsten Moran

A Bronx girl goes north

By Kate Pastor

Everywhere she turned, all Tara Saber- Khiabani could see was ice and land.

Under layers of clothing, amid polar bears and seals, the Kingsbridge teen spent the summer months not sunning herself on lawn chairs, but instead finding a front-row seat from which she could watch the glaciers melt.

She was with approximately 100 students — many of them Canadian and some of them Inuit — who, along with scientists, environmentalists and polar educators, set off on a ship to explore the arctic.

By the end of the trip, facilitated by an organization called Students on Ice Expeditions, Ms. Saber- Khiabani (also known as “Bronx” by students in the program who were enthralled with her roots) did not want to return to her home on Tibbet Avenue.

Her two-week adventure came over the summer between graduating from the Bronx High School of Science and her freshman year at City College, and offered her a complete break from everything she’d known. She met an Inuit elder named Joshua who was born in an igloo and said he had killed a polar bear with one stab to the heart. She visited an old whaling station called Kekerten where she saw a skull and bones belonging to a whale as well as human remains from when whalers had been buried there. She hiked to the Arctic Circle. She saw a polar bear eating its kill. She ate raw seal herself.

Ms. Saber-Khiabani’s focus is on the environment. She has worked as an intern at Wave Hill and recently worked as an environmental intern for the Riverdale Neighborhood House with the Friends of Van Cortlandt Park. One day, she said, she wants to become an environmental engineer.

In order to raise the nearly $9,000 for the trip, she took a job working in a doctor’s office after school and handed her checks over to her parents, who contributed half of the cost. It was worth it.

A cold peace

The vastness and whiteness of the arctic — the stuff fantasies are made of — soothed her, even if the threat to its well-being did not.

“We didn’t have phones. We didn’t have Internet. We didn’t have TV. It brought you back to the basics,” she said.

One day the group was out in zodiacs — inflatable boats — when a pilot spotted a polar bear eating a seal. He radioed the other boats and they all gathered around to watch.

“It was just incredible to share that time and space with a polar bear,” she said. “The blood all over its face, the blood on the ice, the blood in the water.”

One stop along the trip was at a Kimmirut village where she watched two men carry a seal from their boat. Elders from the village came and cut it open and villagers began to dine.

“I just saw everybody with the blood all over their faces,” she said, adding that some children were running around with freshly plucked ribs in their hands.

Soon it was her turn. She held a piece of the meat in her hands and said to herself “just put it in your moth and let it go down.”

Aside from learning that raw seal meat tastes just like, yes, chicken, Ms. Saber-Khiabani said the trip instilled in her the knowledge of just how important it is that the United States, a polar nation, take an active role in preserving the land.

“I couldn’t believe that we were letting it get this bad,” she said.

She learned of melting permafrost that caused the structures built on top of it, in one case a village’s only bridge, to collapse.

“People live there. I think it’s something we forget or we just don’t know,” she said, “They feel climate change and we don’t.”

On returning to New York from the crystalclear air of the north, Ms. Saber-Khiabani had a different type of revelation on the nature of the urban landscape.

“Coming out of the plane, the first thing you notice is the smell. It just smelled like city,” she said.

This is part of the September 3, 2009 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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