seemed to be everywhere in the 90s—you name it, you could own it: mouse pads, T-shirts, coffee mugs, even a life-size blow up Scream, weighted to stand upright, weighted but still wobbly, a palpable image of angst so resonant that, even now, "in the days of Trump and Hillary" (as the Amazon ad promises), it will be marketable again. 
     The cultural omnipresence of The Scream or The Shriek or the Shriek of Nature, as it is also known, has made it seem the crystallization of the painter's career. Yet authorities opening the door to Edvard Munch's studio after his death at the age of eighty stumbled onto a cache of over a thousand paintings, some fifteen thousand prints, plus assorted woodcuts, photographs, and etchings—testimony to an innovative and astonishing productivity. 
     The Scream itself was only one section of The Frieze of Life, an unfinished multi-canvas tango of sex, mortality, and angst pinned down in vibrant pigment.  The screams that fill our lives from cradle to grave reflect such varied moods—cyclonic shifts of joy, lamentation, fear, and orgasmic relief; wail or howl, yelp, bawl, or yip, they dissolve in air, no less super-charged and atmospheric.

You're three, maybe four—you hear a child screaming in the doctor's office; the scream fills the halls, bewitching, magnetic, a pulsing under your skin.  Sunshine beams into the sterile exam room, an arresting cone of light.
      The scene shifts; you're standing outside, in the twitter of bird song and balmy air. Sparrows loop in the sky. You ask about the stranger whose shrieks you heard. What you learn about that ear-splitting voice will surprise you. You've ignored maternal admonitions to keep calm and stay quiet, abandoned the agreed-upon gestures of being good. You remember the tubing, the thin river of blood.
      The scream was, unfortunately, your own.

You initially encountered The Scream in the college library stacks. Skipping one class to complete an assignment for another, you flipped through the oversize art books on the library floor. How arresting it seemed, from the vantage point of a flame-colored floor complete with water stains and cigarette burns, those loops of paint, the freestyling gestures that swirl around the subject's head, upping the image's emotional intensity.
      You muse on the image, pause the loop of electronic noise in your Walkman. The silence fills with the sound of a clock nearby, the minute hand's ticking.
      You thought you'd seen it once before, in the city art museum, but you were wrong. It was a Pollack that you saw, a wall-sized canvas pockmarked with glass, screws, random debris. Maybe you're remembering a Munch poster, hovering like a field balloon by the museum store's exit sign.  
      The shriek of memory is often mistaken.

It's later—years later now, in fact—and time's ticking while you scroll through the posts of a blogger who has used all the available cellphone/Google fuckwitchery to suss out the location of The Scream to a popular bridge in Oslo, which looks a lot like the railing strung across a seawall overlooking the Chesapeake Bay. 
      The Chesapeake you know. Blue sky, predictable tide, sand and panic grass.  A stretch of fescue and Kentucky Blue over which an array of eels thrashes. They are pale, celery green or the faint glint of sea glass, armored with scales, not nearly the size of a tentacle belonging to the Giant Squid—closer to the girth of a baseball bat.
      Thrashing under the sun, thrashing in the breeze with its toxic oxygen. Like them, you are out of your element, thrashing through that moment somehow familiar from dreams—you scream but have no voice. 
      They've been tossed with a purpose—they're bait.
      But you have to watch where you walk, you swerve to avoid them. In the moment and in memory, they are larger than life. But Anguilla rostrata, the true species, is in reality, smaller and olive-green, a tangle fished up in pots thrown to catch blue crabs, Callinectes sapidus, the estuary's beautiful swimmers.
      You make your way to the cottage, circling around the deal table where your mother and the neighbor who invited the family here are rolling out pizza dough. Drops of condensation rest on their tiny glasses of currant-colored wine. Timbered walls, windows, flapping blinds—the calm of domestic design. 
      The screen door lets in the breath of the air; the shriek of black-masked laughing gulls is comforting, ambient sound.

Munch's diaries record the painting's possible genesis: "I was walking along the road with two friends—Then the sun went down—The sky suddenly turned to blood and I felt a great scream in nature—". Other stories circulate: anxiety over a familial propensity to madness, a sister in an asylum within range of an abattoir. Thinking about something like that might make anyone scream. Yet autobiography may have less to do with the canvas than meteorology: the phenomenon of "mother of pearl clouds," iridescent polar stratospheric clouds, might account for wavy backdrop of The Scream's boiling sky.
      Fast forward years to find yourself in the bottle episode of family vacation. A cottage provides the quaint setting for a minimal cast and dialogue-heavy scenes: sit still on a deck in a mid-Atlantic beach town. The air is weighted with tension—it's a family vacation, after all. Tall pines circle the deck; when you look up, the branches create a comfortable canopy.  Conversations drift from neighboring cottages; the voices of passersby are raucous, upbeat—they bestow a pleasing din.
      Siblings, spouses and their children gather over board games. The sky will fade from blue to abalone, lilacs and rosés smudging through shades of violet, slate, and finally charcoal. Imagine crickets and the shuffle of cards, cheerful chatter. It's a respectable plot if the principals remain in a good mood. But that's not what's going to happen. Cooperation and good humor wear thin. Game over when one of the hosts, a father with grown children, explodes in a fit of rage. The shrieks of laughter and sardonic asides are, from his perspective, intolerable.
      He's yelling the way he yelled at you, the girl who struck out on the softball field. Inside he must be screaming. You want to scream as well.
      This time, the target's your spouse.

If you were in the crow's nest of a battleship facing Omaha Beach, you maintained a situational awareness that served you well: you watched the first assault wave storm the shore, you scanned the skies for enemy planes. The action below, on the turbulent tide, lingered in the long aftermath of civilian life.
      If you're the son of the soldier who sat in the crow's nest, you're marked by your father's battle with the bottle in ways you don't want to admit. The hypervigilance you've inherited makes you irritable, combative, prone to judgement.
      If you're the daughter of the son who bottles up anger, you're not consoled by a brother's remark to your spouse: we've all been on the receiving end of that. It's a tired and worn out trope. Under a waxing crescent, the Atlantic is a pool of volatile ink. You and your spouse walk the wrack line where shells are tumbled, pushed forward, dragged back. The tide pounds the shore; you listen to the shush of its retreat. It's a sound that follows you into delayed, fitful sleep.

The Scream has been repeatedly filched, purloined, and taken—thefts which add to its value but clarify nothing. It cannot be sold so it always turns up, is restored to its rightful place. The present is also a bridge to the past. Now is a scuffling in the dried leaves lining the no man's land between this cottage and the next, needles dropping with the sound of plopping paint.
      You have lived under the wavy lines of a shifting sky, in the angst you feel in speaking out; the angst you feel when you should and haven't. The question is always how to move forward.
      This is the thing about narrative and the bottle episode, its challenges and its boredom. The crows were around the house yesterday and the day before that; they will shriek and circle around again. What you call commotion is the lingua franca of the American Crow: their calls—an expansive repertoire of caws and rattles—sound out presence, report annoyance, and mark territory. Such are the shrieks of nature, the exchanges of kin. Their wings shine, a cool obsidian in early light.

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Sometimes an essay is a surprising mashup of past and present, here and now. I've been reading Emily Brönte, Lyanda Lynn Haupt, and Alison Hawthorne Deming, while thinking about the intersection of human and nonhuman geographies from a second floor study in the suburbs where days begin and end with calling crows: [here].