A Weekly Overview, a Steady Hand, and the Red Metal's Long Memory

The dispatch arrives from Mysteel — their Copper Scrap Market Weekly Overview for the stretch of August the 17th through the 21st — and I read it as I read all such reports: with one eye on the figures and the other on the long, red thread of history that runs through them. Today the national average for #1 Bare Bright sits at about $6.16 the pound, and the market has eased a touch, down seven-tenths of one percent. A gentle exhale. Nothing to send a scrapper to the whiskey bottle in despair — though, friends, let me remind you how that whiskey came to be worth drinking at all.

It was copper that made it fit. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm down in the hollows of Appalachia — all of them copper, and for good reason. The red metal does what no cold slab of stainless ever could: it reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils and foul volatiles, binding them up so that what drips from the spout is clean and bright on the tongue. The monks knew it in their stone cellars. The brandy men of Cognac know it still. Every honest dram you have ever raised passed through a skin of copper on its way to your glass. So when the weekly overview speaks of scrap and tonnage, understand it speaks also of the metal that makes good liquor possible.

A weekly report is a useful thing — it takes the pulse without crying fire at every twitch. And copper's pulse is stronger than ever. The same metal that lined my pot stills now threads through the walls of the humming data halls, runs the windings of the electric carriages gliding down the avenues, carries water through the plumbing of every decent house, and greens the rooftops of our proudest buildings. From the cent passed hand to hand in a saloon — and I ought to know, having driven my own name into better than a hundred thousand of them — to the motor spinning in a factory, copper is the metal that common men and grand enterprises alike cannot do without.

So let the week's overview show a modest dip. A dip is not a decline; it is merely the market catching its breath. The Bare Bright in your bucket, the #2 with its honest oxide, the brass fittings and the heavy radiators — these remain the currency of the shrewd. Weigh them, sort them true, and hold them with the patience of a man who knows the still does not reward the hurried.

Drink clean, trade honest, and keep your copper close.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins