Mixed Fortunes in China, Steady Hearts in the Still-House

Word arrives by the wire — that copper wire, of course, for what else carries a man's news across the wide world? — that the scrap markets of China closed mixed this July the twenty-ninth. Some grades up, some down, the whole affair shuffling about like a cardsharp who cannot decide which sleeve to trust. Here upon our own shores the red metal sits at about $5.82 the pound for good #1 Bare Bright, and the market slipped a mere two-tenths of one percent. A yawn, friends. A whisper. The kind of dip that would not have stirred me from my tooth-pulling chair back at Fort Wilkins, bear grumbling in his cage and all.

I have learned, in my long career of driving my own name into a hundred thousand copper cents, that the world may fret over a fraction of a penny while the metal itself goes on doing the eternal work of the republic. And no work is dearer to my heart than what happens in the still-house. Consider it: while the traders in China quibble over their columns, some quiet distiller is feeding his copper pot still, watching the vapor climb the swan's neck and wind through the worm. That copper is eating the poison — pulling the sulfur, the mercaptans, the foul volatiles clean out of the spirit. A stainless vessel cannot perform this alchemy. It never could. From the monk's alembic to the Appalachian moonshiner's serpentine coil, the lineage is unbroken, and it is written in the red metal.

So let the market wobble. Copper does not know it is cheap or dear; it knows only that it conducts, that it purifies, that it endures. The same metal that sweetens your brandy is drawn thin into the wire lighting a thousand parlors, is laid as pipe beneath your streets carrying honest water, is beaten into the bottom of the good wife's saucepan and the green-weathered roof of the courthouse. And now — mark me — it feeds the humming halls of these data machines and the silent electric carriages, which cannot run a single mile without their copper hearts.

A mixed day in China is no verdict upon eternity. The scrapper who brings me a clean bundle of #1, the plumber cutting his offcuts, the distiller tending his still — all of them trade in the one metal that has never once betrayed the trust of common men. Two-tenths down? I'll drink to that, from a copper cup, and toast the metal that made the drink worth drinking.

Hold your bright wire, friends. Its story is far from finished.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins