A nonplussed character wearing a feathered leather hat and a backpack full to bursting says to a disgruntled man “aight it’s been real but im disappearing into the woods forever.”
The would-be hermit turns only his eyes toward the man as he raises his arms in frustration and shouts “you can’t just fuck off into the woods, you have to stay here!”
The man’s expression softens into confusion as his conversational parter’s backpack comes to the fore of his vision as he simply departs. A narrator adds “but he could. And he did.”
The traveler is seen at great distance as the man continues looking on. The narrator continues. “And no one ever saw him again.”
https://www.straight.com/news/into-wild-adventurer-who-starved-to-death-in-bus-may-have-missed-river-crossing-by-one-day
He had water and the means to purify it the entire time, and there’s a claim (i.e. I can’t find a source) that when he attempted to cross the river on the way out that he was only a half mile from a tram that crossed it. If he’d had a map that marked the tram he could’ve gone to the tram. It was an eight mile hike or so to the attempted river crossing from the bus, so he was only a day or so away from civilization.
Les Stroud (Survivorman) goes into this in one his director’s commentaries for Survivorman which are all up on youtube. I don’t remember which one, though.