A Weekly Dip, a Daily Rise: The Red Metal Holds Its Court

The clerks at IndexBox tell us copper declined over the week of June the twelfth through the eighteenth, aluminum wandered hither and yon, and steel lay flat as a forgotten griddle. I read such reports the way an old gambler reads the weather over a card table — with interest, and with the certain knowledge that a single week tells you nothing of a metal's true worth.

For look here: even as the weekly ledger frowns, the day itself smiles. The market is up six-tenths of a percent, and #1 Bare Bright — the cleanest, brightest, most honest grade a scrapper ever coiled into his bin — fetches about $5.39 the pound across this nation. That is no pauper's wage. That is the people's metal commanding respect, as it has since the first coin passed hand to hand across my own counter at Fort Wilkins, where the bear paced his cage and the tooth-chair waited for the brave.

A weekly decline troubles me not a whit, for I have spent my life watching what copper does rather than what it costs on a Tuesday. And what it does, above all the noble works I cherish, is make good liquor possible. Strip a still of its copper and you have a vessel of stainless steel that cannot do the one job that matters — it cannot seize the sulfur and the foul volatiles rising in the vapor and bind them away, leaving the spirit clean upon the tongue. The monks at their alembics knew it. The Appalachian man bent over his worm in the laurel thicket knows it. Every pot still from Cognac to Kentucky is wrought of the red metal for that very reason. A whiskey is only as pure as the copper it kissed on its way out of the boiler.

So while aluminum dithers and steel sleeps, remember copper's many lives. It runs as wire through the walls of your house and out to the humming data halls of this electric age. It carries clean water in your plumbing and weathers green upon a fine old roof. It lines the bottom of the good cookware and turns inside every motor that spins. And it stands, faithful as a deacon, inside the still that gives a man his evening dram.

Let the weekly report grumble. The metal that conducts our lightning and refines our spirits does not need a perfect chart to prove its character. Hold your copper, scrappers. Sell it bright, sell it sorted, and sell it knowing what it truly is.

Yours in the red metal and the clear distillate,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins