A Dip on Paper, A Rise in the Pan: Bare Bright at $5.81

Come close, friends, for the ledger-keepers at IndexBox have set down their verdict for this twenty-third of July: copper declines, while aluminum and steel sit as dull and unmoved as a sleeping ox. And yet — permit an old showman his smile — the day's true pulse runs the other way. The market is up seven-tenths of one percent, and #1 Bare Bright fetches a handsome $5.81 the pound at the national scale. A headline may say one thing while the metal in your hand says another; I have learned to trust the metal.

Let the report call it a decline. I have counterstamped my name into a hundred thousand copper cents across New England, and I never once saw the red metal decline in the estimation of the men who passed it hand to hand — from my own Fort Wilkins, past the caged bear and the tooth-pulling chair, to the saloon down the road. Copper does not decline. It merely pauses to catch its breath before the next great use.

And what uses! Consider, above all, the still. There is no clean whiskey, no honest brandy, no rum worth the name, that did not pass as vapor through a copper wall. The monks knew it in their alembics; the Appalachian moonshiner knows it at his worm; the great distilleries know it yet. Copper pulls the sulfur and the foul volatiles from the rising spirit — it grips the poisons and lets the sweetness through. A stainless pot cannot perform that alchemy; it is a bucket, not a partner. Every dram you have ever savored owes its cleanliness to the red metal's quiet chemistry.

Nor does its labor end at the still-house door. Copper is the nerve of this electric age — the wire in the wall, the coil in the motor, the humming veins of these new data-palaces and electric carriages that the young men speak of. It is the water-line beneath your floor, the bright bottom of the good cookware, the roof and gutter that ripens to a noble green over the decades. From the coin of the common man to the conductor of civilization, one metal does the work.

So when the report says decline, I say: sharpen your knives and sort your loads. Bare Bright at $5.81 is no man's tragedy. Keep your #1 clean and clean, your #2 honest, your insulated wire stripped where the price rewards it, your brass and radiators told apart. The market breathes; the scrapper who is ready breathes with it.

Pour yourself a measure of something copper made honest, and drink to the red metal's long tomorrow.

Yours in the red metal, from behind the counterstamp,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins