I finished my work sooner than expected yesterday and so was able to join my wife and a <!--break-->friend of hers (and seven kids) at Chatham's Lighthouse beach in the late afternoon.  While the kids were happily playing in the waves and digging tunnels for the encroaching tide, I went for a run on the beach.  Well, it was more like a slow, ponderous jog on the beach that eventually slowed to a walk. However, it did not take too long to get well beyond the beach crowds, the surfcasters standing shin-deep with their shiny lures flung effortlessly forty yards into the water, the young couples looking for the more secluded spots, and the isolated Zen beach-goers who prefer to be alone.  I even got out past the beach patroller with his four-wheeler surveying the tricky surf and the birder spying on mating terns in the high grass.  I rounded a bend and there it was: a stretch of sand with nobody on it.  High dunes grassed over with tufts of emerald green rose to my right and waves flecked with bits of seaweed and floating plants flung themselves down to my left.  Thoreau would have been proud.  I thought about his walk along the shore of Cape Cod and wondered what he might have seen that I was not noticing.  I listened and caught the faint rumbles of a buoy making noise offshore.  A couple of seagulls fishwifing each other.  I saw a beach littered with dried seaweed, a couple pieces of wood and straw, and the occasional plastic bottle.  I tried harder to notice what I wasn't noticing.  The curve of the shoreline and the fog bank sitting miles on the water miles out to sea.  The small bubbles popping up in the sand as the surf recedes.  But no grand observations.  No Thoreauvian conclusions.  Nothing Walden-worthy.  So, I shrugged and turned to begin my run back to where my kids were playing in the water watched by my wife, happy to have had the chance.