Among American long distance hikers there’s a thing – a real thing – called “Springer Fever.” It hits this time of year. Hard to avoid. Not that you’d necessarily want to. It’s this deep urge to go hiking again, to be back in Georgia on Springer Mountain (hence the name), starting another Appalachian Trail hike. Or, for me this year, walking church to church the length of Britain.

Turns out this is nothing new. Geoffrey Chaucer pointed to something similar back in the 1300s. Read this, from a modern English translation lines 1-14 of the General Prologue of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” [emphasis added]:

WHEN APRIL WITH HIS SHOWERS SWEET WITH FRUIT
THE DROUGHT OF MARCH HAS PIERCED UNTO THE ROOT
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower;
When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath,
Quickened again, in every holt and heath,
The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun
Into the Ram one half his course has run,
And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye
(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)-
THEN DO FOLK LONG TO GO ON PILGRIMAGE,
And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,
To distant shrines well known in sundry lands.

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Enjoy your pilgrimage this year, whether it takes you to John o’Groats or to Land’s End. Or somewhere else. Mine own – to JoG – begins in about a week and a half or 2 weeks. And I can be your proxy pilgrim if you keep reading this blog.