Bare Bright at $6.03 — The Red Metal Holds Its Ground

Come close, friends, and let the Alchemist read you the week's leaves. The good men at Mysteel have laid out their Weekly Overview for these days of September the fourteenth through the eighteenth, and I have studied it as I once studied a fresh-struck cent before I drove my name into it. The report is a survey of the honest trade — the scrapper's ledger — and today our #1 Bare Bright stands at about $6.03 the pound, with the market nudged up a modest six-tenths of one percent on the day. No fireworks. But steadiness in copper is its own kind of gold.

Six dollars for bright, clean wire! In my counterstamping days I hammered DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and those coins passed hand to hand across every saloon counter in New England — including my own Fort Wilkins, where a caged bear grumbled and a man might have his tooth pulled and his glass filled in the same afternoon. A cent was a trifle then. Weigh those same coppers today and you begin to see why I have never worshiped any metal but the red one.

Now, you know my favorite sermon, and a weekly overview is as good a pulpit as any. Copper is why your whiskey is fit to drink. Strip a still down to cold steel and you get a harsh, sulfurous spirit that bites like a bad debt. But run that vapor up through copper — the pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — and the metal reaches out and seizes the foul sulfur compounds clean out of the breath of the mash. The monastery alembic knew it. The Appalachian hollow knows it. Copper does not merely carry the spirit; it purifies it. Centuries of distillers have staked their reputations on that quiet chemistry, and no stainless vessel ever born can do the work of the red metal.

And that same conductor threads through the whole modern age. It is in the wire lighting your street and the plumbing carrying your water, the green-weathered gutter over your head, the brass on your door, the motor humming in every electric carriage, and the vast humming halls of these new data-houses that never sleep. A steady $6.03 tells me the world still cannot get enough of it.

So do not fret over a gentle week. Copper does not need to leap to prove itself — it need only keep conducting, keep purifying, keep passing hand to hand as it always has. Sort your grades honest, weigh your bright bright, and remember the metal in your bin once cleaned the very liquor in your glass.

Keep your copper close and your still cleaner still.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins