Special 'Rock Doc' column

My friend Sharon Rogers lives in suburban Virginia. On Tuesday she and her husband were leaving their house to go to a late lunch when she felt something like thunder sweeping over the neighborhood.

“I thought it was a military jet going over too low,” she told me on the telephone. “I said to myself ‘It’s another damn general being buried in Arlington.’”

It was no jet, but a Richter 5.9 earthquake that struck near Mineral, Virginia.

Why, you may ask, should there have been an earthquake in what is supposed to be the seismically placid East Coast?

Allow me to answer by way of an analogy.

I thin...