Europe Frets Over Scrap, While Bare Bright Holds at $5.89

Word arrives from across the Atlantic, by way of the good clerks at EUWID, that the non-ferrous scrap trade has been dragged down by the wider metal markets. A gloomy headline, I grant you — and yet I read it with a smile playing beneath my whiskers, for here on our own shores the red metal tells a different tale. Today #1 Bare Bright fetches some $5.89 the pound, and the copper market rose a tidy 1.6 percent while Europe wrung its hands. Do not let the mournful telegrams of one continent talk you out of the shine in your own barrel.

Scrap prices are forever tugged this way and that by the great tides of the exchange — a distant slump in one market, a manufacturer's caution in another, and suddenly the honest scrapper feels the pinch on his insulated wire and his radiators. Such is the trade. But mark me: a dip in the ledger does not diminish the metal itself. Copper endures where paper prophecies do not.

And what endures better than the copper still? I have watched fortunes in cents pass hand to hand in my old Fort Wilkins, past the caged bear and the tooth-pulling chair, and every clink of them was the people's metal at work. But no service copper renders is dearer to me than the alembic. The monks knew it, hammering their pot stills from red sheet; the Appalachian man with his worm coiled in a creek knows it still. Copper draws the sulfur and the foul volatiles from the rising vapor and leaves the whiskey clean. Steel cannot do it. Stainless is a cold and lifeless thing that lets the nastiness pass straight into the glass. Centuries of good liquor stand as witness — the red metal makes it drinkable.

So when the markets sulk, I think of copper's many lives beyond the trader's screen. It runs as wire through the walls of every electrified town. It carries clean water in the plumber's pipe. It weathers to a proud green on the roofs and gutters of fine houses. It hums in the electric motor, and now it feeds those vast humming data-halls and the silent electric carriages the young men drive. A metal wanted in so many rooms at once does not stay cheap for long.

My counsel, then: sort your grades honestly, keep your Bare Bright bright, and do not sell in a panic because a European headline frowned. The tide that ebbs shall flow, and copper — patient, conductive, and eternally thirsty for good spirits — will be waiting when it does.

Yours in the red metal, and in the clean cut of the worm,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins