Volatile Markets, Steady Metal: Bare Bright Holds at $6.39

Friends, the reports out of Europe — the good clerks at EUWID tell us non-ferrous scrap keeps climbing in a market they rightly call volatile. Volatile! I have known volatile things. I once kept a caged bear at my Fort Wilkins and pulled teeth for coin in the same afternoon. Yet through every panic and boom the red metal has never once lost its nerve.

Here at home the honest measure holds: #1 Bare Bright at about $6.39 the pound, and the market flat as a millpond today — up not a whisker, down not a hair. Do not mistake that stillness for weakness. It is the poise of a metal that knows its own worth while lesser goods lurch about like drunkards leaving a saloon.

And speaking of drink — for that is my favorite sermon — consider why copper is the metal that keeps rising in men's esteem. Every clean spirit you have ever raised to your lips owes its sweetness to copper. The monks with their alembics knew it; the Appalachian man coiling his worm through a mountain spring knows it; the great whiskey houses know it still. Copper draws the sulfur and the foul volatiles out of the rising vapor as no cold stainless drum ever can. A stainless still gives you liquid; a copper still gives you something a Christian may drink with pleasure. That is chemistry, and it is also poetry.

So when the traders wring their hands over a jumpy market, I think of all the quiet places copper is doing its patient work. It carries the lightning through the wire that lights your street. It runs the water clean through the pipe in your wall. It lines the bottom of the good cook's pan and greens the roofs of proud houses. It spins in every electric motor, and now — mark me — it feeds the humming halls of these new data-engines and the electric carriages men build to race about in. The whole modern age is strung together on copper thread.

In my counterstamping years I drove my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I watched them travel hand to hand through every eating-house and grog-shop in New England. Copper was the people's metal then, passed among common men. It is the people's metal yet — only now a pound of Bare Bright buys a good deal more supper than a stamped cent ever did.

Let the market shiver. The scrapper who fills his bin with clean bright wire and the distiller who tends his copper pot are both, in their way, keepers of the same old faith. Sell honest, drink well, and trust the red metal.

Yours in copper and good spirits,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins