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.