ASHLAND — Grace under pressure. When a person exhibits that quality, that means they’re cool on the outside during a crisis or a difficult situation.

But you don’t really know what's going on inside them.

On a recent warm afternoon, I did what I usually do. I went swimming.

The pool I frequent is large and beautiful, surrounded by a gorgeous landscape.

Because of those natural surroundings, it’s not unusual for the occasional frog to land in the water.

The ones I’ve seen are tiny and I usually don’t notice them. I only know they’re there because a child takes an interest in them and lets everyone know within earshot that he or she has found a frog.

I could do without animals in the pool, but the smaller they are, the better.

So on that warm afternoon, I was doing the side stroke on the side of the pool that’s opposite the side my belongings are on when a young woman yelled at a lifeguard “There's a rat in the pool.”

Grace under pressure.

I would have loved to have panicked and jumped out of the pool at the nearest ladder, but I avoided the ladders after twisting my knee on one a couple of summers ago.

No one else was getting too excited about it, either, even the swimmers who were close to the site where the alleged rat was spotted. Besides, a rat. Really? Probably just a field mouse.

I calmly continued swimming as three of the lifeguards ran toward the rat siting. I did start swimming toward the steps that are easy to climb out on.

I drew closer to the woman who reported the rat.

“Where is it?” I asked her.

“It moved on to the kiddie pool,” she said. The kiddie pool is connected to the main pool, but it’s separated by a low wall. The animal was scurrying along the ledge where water is sucked in, filtered and recirculated.

“That’s a small area. That probably wasn’t a rat. A rat probably wouldn’t fit in there,” I said.

“Oh, it fit in there,” she said.

“Anyway, rats probably can’t swim,” I said.

“Sure they can,” her mother chimed in. “River rats are good swimmers. And fast, too.”

“Oh.”

We watched the lifeguards chasing along the edges of the kiddie pool with their bucket, trying to capture the invader and having a good time laughing and screaming. Nearly every swimmer had stopped playing to watch the adventure. I inched closer to the steps. One thing was definite: If something mean and hairy started charging through the water at me, I was going to have one foot on the bottom step. If everyone else wanted to take a chance on rabies, that was their business.

Eventually, the boys caught the animal and everyone returned to swimming.

Thank goodness I hadn’t panicked and run screaming out of the pool.

Still, that rat had been in contact with the water. Couldn’t we catch something from a dirty river rat, just by it having been in the pool? Isn’t that a possibility?

Nobody else seemed worried about it, so I just kept telling myself there were plenty of chemicals in the water to kill whatever that thing was carrying,

Eventually, word got around that the rat wasn't in fact a rat, but a ground squirrel.

I've always heard that a squirrel is just a rat with a pretty tail. A ground squirrel isn't much different, but somehow, it made a lot of difference to me.

When I think about grace under pressure, I think of a letter to Dear Abby from years ago. A woman had run across a worm in a salad she was eating while she was talking to the hostess of the party she was attending. She ate around the worm while she continued the conversation, never mentioning the worm. Abby told her she was grace under pressure and that she had the skills to write her own advice column.

I wonder if a squirrel in a pool is as good as a worm in a salad.

LEE WARD can be reached at lward@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2661.