Bare Bright at $5.39: The Red Metal Surges on May 8

Friends and fellow worshippers of the red metal, the dispatch from IndexBox lands warm in my hand this eighth of May: copper scrap surges, and the honest national average for #1 Bare Bright now stands at $5.39 the pound, the market itself up a tidy six-tenths of a percent on the day. A modest gain by the numbers, but I have learned in a long life that copper rarely shouts — it accumulates, hand to hand, as it did when I drove my own name into a hundred thousand cents across New England.

Let me tell you why a scrapper ought to grin at such a figure. The metal you haul in your truck bed — your bright wire, your honest #1 and #2, your radiators and brass — is the very same substance that has made good liquor possible since the monks first hunched over their alembics. There is no spirit worth the name that has not kissed copper. The pot still, the worm coiled in its cooling barrel, the gleaming alembic of the Appalachian moonshiner — all of red metal, and for a reason no chemist can repeal. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles, dragging them down so what runs from the spout is clean, sweet, and fit for a Christian throat. A stainless still cannot do it; it stands there cold and inert while the nasty compounds sail right through. Pour me whiskey from steel and I will pour it back into the gutter.

So when the price climbs, remember you are not trading mere junk — you are trading the soul of the distiller's craft. That same copper, when it is not perfecting brandy and rum, is threading through the walls of every house as electrical wire, carrying water in the plumber's neat runs, bottoming the good cook's pans, greening gently on roofs and gutters, and spinning inside every electric motor. In this modern age it crouches by the millions of pounds inside the great humming data-halls and the electric carriages that hiss down the avenue. The metal that cleaned your grandfather's moonshine now cools the machines that count the world's money. Same red metal. Same patient conductor.

A six-tenths rise is no thunderclap, but I have seen the bear in my old Fort Wilkins stir slow before it stood to full height. Copper is stirring. Sell your bright wire stripped and clean, keep your grades honest, and do not let a buyer tell you the red metal is common. It is the metal of coins, of conductors, of every clean dram ever poured. Common in the hand, never common in worth.

Keep your worm bright and your conscience brighter.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins