When Delivery Day Roars but the Scrapyard Dozes

The wire from metal.com tells a curious tale this morning: prices surged upon the delivery date, yet the secondary trade — the honest business of scrap — lay sluggish as a bear after supper. I have kept such a bear, and I know the mood well. The market up 1.1% on the day, Bare Bright fetching some $6.49 the pound, and still the yards go quiet. What gives?

I'll tell you what gives. On delivery day the paper men must settle their accounts, and the red metal must be had, at whatever price the moment demands. Meanwhile the scrapper, no fool he, hunkers down with his coils of #1 and his radiators and his bright new drops, waiting to see whether this surge holds water or evaporates like cheap spirit off a cold plate. A wise policy. Copper rewards patience.

And speaking of spirit off a plate — permit an old distiller's man his favorite sermon. Every drop of clean whiskey you have ever poured owes its life to copper. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm running cold through his creek — all copper, and for reason: the red metal seizes upon the sulfurous devils in the vapor and drags them out, leaving the liquor sweet. A stainless still is a handsome, lifeless thing; it will not do this work. From the monastery alembics of old to the hills of Appalachia, the men who make good drink have trusted copper alone. That trust does not surge and slump on a delivery date. It endures.

Consider all the lives this metal leads while the traders squabble. It runs as wire through the walls of every house electrified in this modern age; it hums in the motors and, so they tell me, feeds the great data-halls and the electric carriages now crowding the roads. It carries clean water through your plumbing. It bottoms your wife's finest pans and greens the roofs and gutters against a hundred winters. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents, and those coins passed hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England — including my own Fort Wilkins, bear, tooth-pulling chair and all. Copper was the people's metal then. It remains so.

So let the delivery day roar and the scrapyard doze. This is only the tide breathing. If your bin holds bright copper, you hold something the paper men must eventually come and buy. Hold it steady, weigh it honest, and remember you are custodian of the one metal that lights the lamp, carries the water, and makes the whiskey worth drinking.

Keep your copper bright and your still brighter.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins